A programmable positioning stepper-motor controller with a multibus/IEEE 796 compatible interface

Abstract

A programmable positioning stepper-motor controller, based on the Multibus/IEEE 796 standard interface, has been assembled by use of some intelligent and programmable integrated circuits. This controller, organized as a bus-slave unit, has been planned for local management of up to four stepper motors working simultaneously. The number of steps, the direction of rotation and the step-rate for the positioning of each motor are issued by the bus master microcomputer to the controller which handles all the required operations. Once each positioning has been performed, the controller informs the master by generating a proper bus-vectored interrupt. Displacements in up to 64,000 steps may be programmed with step-rates ranging from 0.1 to 6550 steps/sec. This device, for which only low-cost, high-performance components are required, can be successfully used in a wide range of applications and can be easily extended to control more than four stepper motors.