My impression is that a lot of times new technology is purely sales driven - there is no real, quantifiable need but we need our product to seem different in the market.
Haha, yes. It's hard to argue that.
The marketing wank is indeed strong these days.
How long until we get our first Bluetooth & wifi enabled wireless IoT servodrive?
It scares me that some people thing wireless controlled servo drives would be a good idea... Nothing like someone hiding a cigerette packet sized jammer in a warehouse to stop production for a month....
That said. I would personally rather like a drive that can be configured via bluetooth from a phone app as an option (switch on side of drive) Though with the advent of fieldbus being so common, it doesn't hold as much appeal these days.
One of the big things I like with elmo is that -it just fucking works-
I wire the drive up, I connect to it, go through the setup wizard, spend half-hour turning it and you get damn impressive performance for the average application. You don't even need to enter the motor specs, it runs some 'experiments' on the motor to work everything out - which actually works.
That said I'm seeing a lot of new companies coming out with these features.
Elmo's Gold range is pretty reliable from all I've seen, rarely get any back from the ones I've helped install, and when I do it's almost certainly a user error (Elmo burn the drives in for 24 hours before sending them out, heck, their 'Extreme Environment' range, they do full vibrational testing under full load too.
I've done a good bit of work for military applications, one thing they absolutely hate is change. So many still use VME64, Resolvers etc. Yet, I'm seeing a lot of them begin to use Elmo. I think that says something.
I really do agree with your point on how many products out there are badly designed these days and 'look the shit' yet turn out so bad. It's a symptom of modern business operation where the management don't care what they ship out, as long as it makes them money. Career CEOs and Managing directors Etc. Ones who just hop between completely different industries with no expertese in the actual product they are in charge of.