How much could a customised motor controller save you?

You may have heard us making the case for customised motor controllers and focusing on a range of benefits – improved energy expenditure, customised sizings and bespoke performance are all key factors. 

However, you’ve probably already read us claiming that customised motor controllers can also save you money. Based on the fact that we don’t like people making claims without backing them up with evidence, we therefore decided that it was time to provide some clear evidence of how this can be achieved and the approximate volumes that would be required in order to do this.

Example 1 – a reduced power and custom sized ZDSP

In this case the customer initially started out with the ZDSP stepper motor controller but was using it with a very small NEMA 17 stepper motor and only using approximately 1A current. They therefore asked us to prepare a quote for them to see where the payoff point would be for them in developing a reduced power controller.

In this case the customer was buying approximately 5-600 ZDSP’s a year, taken in batches of 100. Based on these batch sizes, the customer was paying £30.78/unit for this high quality, UK designed and manufactured stepper motor controller.

The total cost per year for this board was therefore £18468.

Reduced power reduces the cost

The quotation we put forward in this example including a £3500 development fee to design the controller but, as a result of the component savings and the much more focused specification we were able to offer the driver in batches of 100 for £20.84. Based on the annual quantities used by this particular customer, it can therefore be seen that, by going ahead with this development, the customer began saving money in less than a year. 

The ZDSP cost £18468 for one year supply.

The new driver costs £16004 in Year 1 (already a saving, despite the £3500 development fee).

Year 2 costs £12504. A saving of £5964.

An all in one intelligent stepper motor controller system saves time and money

In this example we offered the customer a modified version of the ZD10LCD stepper motor controller. This was custom programmed to the customer’s unique requirements with the system being delivered pre-programme and ready to use. The user interface and driver are all combined within the same unit and hence save space as well as time and money.

Based on the customer’s annual requirements and typical batch sizes we were able to offer this controller package at £82/unit for batches of 10. The programming charge for this project required 3 days work to setup and test and was therefore charged at £960 total. The savings can therefore be calculated as follows.

The PLC and driver system cost £31217 for the year.

The ZD10LCD with custom programmed interface cost £9160 for year 1 and £8200 for year 2.