Up to 40% reduction in machine costs for direct printing

The innovative Tesseract printing machine began as a sketch concept on a napkin after the engineers from Norwalt Automation had seen a demo of the XPlanar system from Beckhoff: Magnetically floating movers position printing parts with six degrees of freedom in motion. This allows a single print engine to cover a wide range of geometries, and changeovers to other formats are quick and easy via software.

For five decades, Norwalt Automation Group has engineered its success through custom machine automation. The third-generation, family‑owned business with facilities in Randolph, New Jersey and Tampa, Florida serves several industries, including digital printing, packaging, pharmaceuticals, and food and beverage. The company’s core strength lies in solving complex, custom automation problems for large CPG (consumer packaged goods) customers, often Fortune 50 companies. Especially the major brands are seeking faster regional product launches, seasonal releases, and reduced inventory risk.

From label to direct printing

Traditional printing methods with plastic and paper labels involve lengthy setup times, frequent manual interventions, and much larger amounts of material waste due to misprints or inefficient changeovers. Brands that wanted to experiment with limited editions, regional designs, or rapid promotional runs were typically forced to either outsource small runs to contract packaging companies or accept high sunk costs and long waits.

Norwalt saw the need to completely rethink how label-printing machines are designed – moving toward solutions that accelerate printing, minimize waste, and lower cost. The resulting approach is direct-to-object printing. “A lot of time, what happens in the CPG market is costs start shooting through the roof because you’re ordering large reels of labels, you have to hold them in an air-conditioned unit, and it takes up a lot of space that could be dedicated to other manufacturing,” says Technical Sales Director Kyle Seitel. “When you move to direct-to-object printing, you’re basically replacing label reels with ink. A bottle of ink goes a long way and doesn’t need to be put in a special room. Lowering costs.”

Many direct‑to‑object systems are limited to a single geometry, however, and cannot handle tapered, irregular, or complex shapes without extensive mechanical fixturing. Norwalt’s goal was to support a wide variety of geometries in one flexible machine, allow rapid software‑driven changeovers, and scale throughput by adding modules as needed in the field.

Six degrees of freedom in printing

The direct‑to‑object printing solution that Norwalt developed is now known as the Tesseract, a modular machine built around the XPlanar intelligent transport system and PC‑based control technology from Beckhoff. In geometry, a tesseract refers to a hypercube that extends a 2D square and a 3D cube into four dimensions and exhibits complex properties, especially when rotated. Norwalt’s equally advanced Tesseract began as a sketch concept on a bar napkin after viewing a demo of the mechatronic motion capabilities of the XPlanar system: Norwalt engineers imagined using the magnetic movers to dynamically position parts with six degrees of freedom so that a single print engine could cover many more geometries. They validated the idea incrementally by testing a small three‑by‑three array of XPlanar tiles with a single printhead and then scaling up by adding tiles and additional printheads as needed. This modular approach allowed Norwalt to quickly grow capacity in the field with minimal rework. “That’s the real beauty of XPlanar - as we run out of room, we can just keep adding tiles,” says Kyle Seitel.

XPlanar flying movers and TwinCAT software running on a CX2062 Embedded PC provide the flexible, software‑driven, adaptive part handling Norwalt required. Movers can rotate parts 360°, translate them in X and Y coordinates, and even adjust Z height up to 5 mm, so even complex geometries are moved optimally around the printheads for high-quality labeling. With six degrees of freedom in motion, XPlanar ensures consistent printing results down to the sub-millimeter. The containers are loaded and unloaded onto the levitating XPlanar movers by a robot arm.

Motion profiles are software controlled, so changing the path from circular to linear or adjusting dwell points is a button‑press operation via the HMI rather than an exhaustive mechanical changeover.

For additional motion control, ELM7212 servomotor terminals and AM8100 series servomotors control printhead positioning and any linear axes that required high precision; these ultra-compact drives are networked via EtherCAT to ensure low‑latency triggering and smooth overlay of multiple ink colors. EtherCAT provides deterministic, high‑speed communication across the Tesseract’s range of distributed I/O modules, enabling extremely tight system-wide synchronization. Instead of spending hours assigning IP addresses and tracing wiring errors, with EtherCAT’s diagnostic capabilities, engineers can scan the EtherCAT network and quickly identify all connected devices and find the exact location of cabling problems, reducing commissioning and debugging time from days to minutes in many cases. Machine safety is also integrated via TwinSAFE I/O terminals and Safety over EtherCAT (FSoE).

The TwinCAT HMI software, which includes a PackML state machine, is displayed on CP22xx multi-touch Control Panels and CP3xxx series Panel PCs. TwinCAT automation software became the unified development environment for XPlanar, PLC, all motion control, HMI, machine safety, and higher‑level PC tasks. Norwalt’s engineers leveraged TwinCAT’s structured text and object‑oriented programming (OOP) capabilities to build modular, reusable function blocks, properties, and methods, and standardized motion profiles they could apply across machines. The text‑based workflow also allowed Norwalt to adopt standard software version control practices – branching, commits, and merges – which speeds up development and makes rollbacks and audits straightforward.

This cut programming times substantially; what once required hours of careful manual work is now achievable in minutes through standard software workflows. That productivity translates into faster machine iterations, quicker fixes in the field, and more predictable delivery schedules.

By working closely with Beckhoff USA’s Special Projects Team (SPT) and technical support, Norwalt’s controls engineers climbed the learning curve quickly and received practical help for complex integrations. “I couldn’t have asked for better people to get me to a point where I can take projects and run them on my own,” says Michael Forte, Controls Engineer at Norwalt.

The proof is in the print

The Tesseract program delivered multiple successful outcomes. The most visible impact is operational flexibility: direct‑to‑object printing removes the need for large reels of labels and their associated waste, slashes holding costs, and lets companies run customized articles on demand.

Norwalt also achieved large reductions in mechanical complexity and improved maintainability since XPlanar replaced many traditional mechanical components and gearboxes. “Mechanically, it reduces the cost of a machine by 30% to 40%, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars,” says Norwalt’s Executive Business Director, Keith Harman. The smaller mechanical footprint also reduced machine size, saving floor space, and fewer mechanical parts also mean fewer failures. “And for any errors we do get, 95% of all fixes can be handled remotely because there’s no mechanical failure to correct,” says Keith Harman.

Product quality and print performance improved as well. Precise control and tightly synchronized EtherCAT communications allowed multiple color passes with the registration accuracy required for high‑quality results. The result is a machine and process that fit the company’s long‑term goal of delivering the factory of the future to CPG and pharmaceutical companies through adaptable, future‑ready automation and mechatronics.