Smart Motors

I have not seen this mentioned on the list, but today I talked to
these folks and it seemed that it might be of interest to some & that
others might have already evaluated them & could shed some additional
light.

A company in California is manufacturing what they call a smart
motor. It is a packaged servomotor, encoder, and control
electronics. They claim about $500 per axis(and up) & are able to
control up to 5 axes simultaneous contouring from a PC controller
program through the Serial port, daisey chained to each motor and a
DC power supply. The PC controller program is apparently included &
understands G-code. I asked about cutter comp & was not satisfied
that they do it now, but it sounds like they may have already worked
out the algorithms & could implement it rather quickly if needed.

http://www.animatics.com

Anybody else looked at these? They claim 3 motors, a power supply
and a PC are all that you need to build a CNC servo system. I heard
the phrase "Position Time Pairs" used to describe the interface
between the PC & the smart motors.