SICK has announced miniTwin, a safety light curtain that allows monitoring with minimum safety distances and no blind zones even when systems are cascaded in corner mounting.
The miniTwin safety light curtain offers resolutions of 14 mm, 24 mm, and 34 mm. The high resolution and rapid response times of the miniTwin permit short safety distances when necessary for optimised work ergonomy.
The light curtain, which has a range of 0 metres to 4 metres, can achieve protective field heights of between 120 mm and 1,200 mm. The housing size increments of 60 mm offer optimum adaptation of the protective fields to the particular machine conditions.
The miniTwin light curtain contains the transmitter and receiver elements in identical twin sticks. Separated by a central synchronisation beam, the transmitter and receiver elements are symmetrically arranged in one housing half each.
Which miniTwin acts as the host and which as the guest is defined via the particular connection plug variant with one or two cables. The identical nature of the transmitter and receiver, as well as of the host and guest devices, offers machine constructors a high level of standardisation.
Electrical connection takes place via a standard connection cable and 5-pin M12 system connector, and it offers the full functionality of external device monitoring (EDM) and reset. Optional configuration takes place during the power-up cycle following electrical connection — automatically in the case of EDM — and by pressing a button for reset.
The light curtain also contains a continuous row of LED indicators along its entire length, which serves as an alignment aid, status indicator, and diagnostic tool and provides visual user-friendly delineation of the protective field on both sides of the sensor pair.