1. Welcome to Contours
What Contours does
Contours is a motion design and control application from Myostat. It lets you configure one or more CoolMuscle motors, capture real motion by moving them manually, shape that motion until it feels right, and play it back on demand across every motor at once. The result is a synchronized multi-axis performance you can save, reload, and rerun.
Contours was originally designed for show control and animation, but its core capability — precise, time-indexed, spline-generated motion — makes it a natural fit for a wide range of industries and applications. Anywhere that a machine needs to follow a non-linear, repeatable motion profile, Contours can be the tool that defines and executes it.
Applications
Show control and animation
Stage and exhibit motion, animatronics, camera moves, themed installations, and any setup where motors need to move together in a pre-designed, repeatable sequence. Shows can be linked to a video or audio file, so motion is designed and reviewed in context with the accompanying content.
Automated testing and quality control
Non-linear motion profiles are well suited to simulating the real-world loads and movements that products experience in use. Contours drives a test fixture through a repeatable custom cycle — speeding up, slowing down, reversing, dwelling — with identical results every run. This is useful for fatigue and endurance testing, functional verification, and reproducing field-recorded motion profiles in a lab setting.
Printing and converting
Web-fed printing and converting lines often require variable-speed feed profiles — slowing before a cut, accelerating through a print zone, or dwelling for a registration mark. Contours lets you design these profiles graphically or import them from CSV and execute them with servo precision.
Cutting and slitting
Cutting operations benefit from non-linear speed profiles that slow the blade or web at the cut point and accelerate between cuts to maximise throughput. Contours can drive the feed axis with a custom profile shaped around cut position and material characteristics.
Packaging machinery
Packaging lines involve complex, repeating motion cycles — filling, sealing, indexing, ejecting — each with its own ideal speed and dwell profile. Contours is well suited to intermittent indexing with timed dwell and acceleration ramps, filling nozzle actuation, and pick-and-place motions with gentle acceleration at grip and release points.
Electronic cam replacement
Physical cams are expensive to manufacture, difficult to adjust, and time-consuming to swap. A Contours profile is the electronic equivalent: define your cam curve as data points, generate the spline, and run it on a servo axis. Modifying the motion means editing a profile, not machining a new part.
Research and prototyping
When developing new mechanisms or systems, Contours lets you define arbitrary motion sequences and run them on a physical prototype. The built-in Test mode streams live position, speed, and torque data back to the application in real time, giving immediate feedback on how the mechanism responds as you iterate on the profile.
Rehabilitation and therapy equipment
Medical and rehabilitation devices often require smooth, patient-specific motion that varies in speed and range throughout the cycle. A Contours profile defines the exact trajectory — starting slow, moving through a controlled range, and returning gently — for consistent, repeatable sessions. Recording motion by jogging the axis manually makes it practical to capture a clinician-defined movement and reproduce it programmatically.
Conveyor and material handling
Material handling often requires non-constant velocity: accelerating from rest, running at speed, decelerating before a handoff, and dwelling while a downstream process completes. Contours profiles express all of this in a single smooth curve. Multi-axis shows allow coordinated handling across more than one conveyor or transfer system.
Agricultural and food processing equipment
Sorting, portioning, and processing equipment must often adapt its speed to product characteristics. Contours allows different profiles to be designed for different product types and recalled as needed, with synchronized multi-axis operation where a handling axis and a processing axis must work in coordinated sequence.
What you need to get started
A Windows PC with Contours installed.
One or more CoolMuscle motors, powered and ready to communicate.
A connection path to each motor — an Ethernet network, or a serial / USB-to-serial cable on an available COM port.
Optional: a DirectInput-compatible joystick for hands-on motor jogging while recording.
Tip. If this is your first time, read Chapter 2 — Key Concepts before doing anything else. A few minutes spent on vocabulary will save hours later.
Conventions used in this guide
On-screen buttons, menu items, and field labels are shown in bold, for example Save.
Keyboard keys look like this:
Ctrl+S.File paths and code appear in
monospace.Blockquotes with a leading Tip / Note / Caution label flag advice and warnings.