Stepper Driver Research Articles

MEDIC-The SmartMedicine Dispenser

Aged had to be medicated on time, MEDIC is a specially designed smart medication dispenser is for the persons taking medications without having a close supervision or guidance from a medical professional, user will not be exposed to an error prone task of administering misdosage of medicine at the wrong time. The components of MEDIC are microcontroller, an OLED display, stepper motor drivers with stepper motors, alarm system, a multiple tablet container to store different types of tablets and dispenser for medicine storage and dispensing and a cooling compartment for vaccine storage. The overall procedural operation helps the caretaker to feed the prescription and the time to dispense multiple types of tablets into the container. The Alarm System is incorporated to provide two types of indications one by LED light indication and the other by providing a buzzer sound. The user is required to consume the pills and press the reset button to bring back the container position near the funnel and there is an alarm to check for the tablets in the pill container and to inform the caretaker to fill the dispensing container with pills. These two alarms are also alerted through a message alert to the users through their cellphone.

HyperRail: Modular, 3D printed, 1–100 m, programmable, and low-cost linear motion control system for imaging and sensor suites

Abstract Reliable, accurate, and affordable linear motion control systems for precision agriculture applications are currently not easily accessible due to their elevated cost. Most systems available to the public have price tags in the thousands of dollars and their dimensions cannot be easily customized. Current systems have a maximum length of about ten meters, and for a typical greenhouse application that length may not be sufficient. The price of the system increases with an increase in length, and with a base price in the thousands of dollars it becomes impractical to buy a system for such application. Our HyperRail is a modular linear motion system with a repeatability of 2 mm and current top speed of 200 mm/s. This is possible through a stepper motor driver that allows for 1/16th microstepping giving an average of 6180 steps per revolution. An advantage that this system has is its ability to increase or decrease the length of system with minimum effort and only nominal increase in price. The HyperRail can be mounted on a set of tripods or directly on the structure of a building such as a greenhouse. The base price for a three-meter system, on tripods is US$278 and only US$45 for each additional 1.5 m of length.

Wind-solar Complementary Controller Design of Round frame Wind generators

A new-type wind-solar complementary controller applied to round frame wind generators was designed and realized. This wind generator could realize real-time adjustment of paddle angle according to wind power so as to reach high safety and sustainable power generation effect even under a hurricane. The controller was integrated with a stepping motor driver. Integral separation PID control algorithm was used to drive stepping motor and adjust paddle angle so as to realize closed-loop control of generator velocity. Three-phase charging method was used to realize three-phase charging of storage battery so as to effectively lengthen its service life. MPPT algorithm was used to realize wind-solar complementary maximum power point tracking, thus improving the controller efficiency. STM32F103RBT6 chip-based wind-solar complementary controller was designed to complete controller hardware design and software programming. The system prototype was fabricated and experimented, and the experiment indicated that this controller could realize generator velocity control and battery charging-discharging functions with high efficiency and steady and reliable operation.

New daylight fluctuation control in an optical fiber-based daylighting system

Daylighting systems have recently been developed as another way to harness solar energy and contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Various technologies can be used in daylighting systems. These technologies differ with respect to the sunlight collection systems and sunlight transmission systems they employ, but have solar luminaires in common. Many factors, such as the fluctuations in the intensity of solar irradiance, limit the efficiency of daylighting systems. This study presents the design, construction and assessment of a daylight fluctuations control for enclosed spaces with no direct access to daylight from side openings. A new control algorithm is proposed for this purpose based on daylighting monitoring and a low cost microcontroller. It also allows communication between several solar luminaires based on long range wireless solutions. The main components of the proposed daylight fluctuation control are: the luminaire, mirror, shaft, frame, stepper motor driver, stepper motor, light sensor, limit switch, XBee and microcontroller. The system uses solar luminaries and dimmable lamps. Tests performed in the laboratory on the system have shown positive results. The different dimming profiles perceived have a linear zone; hence, the perceived changes in brightness are correct. The Just Noticeable Difference is less than 200 (lx). And, the solar luminaire efficiency has good results that vary between 71.60% and 76.44%, depending on the used step angle.

Design and Realization of a Stepper Motor Driver with PLC

The paper is giving a simple and economical solution but with high performance for programming and controlling of Stepper Motor ( SM ) by using an industrial Programmable Logic Controller ( PLC ). PLC is advanced as a control device without any interface or drive circuits, thereby reducing the number of circuit components lowering the cost and improving the whole reliability of the system. SM is precise and accurate in creating discrete stationary angular revolutions, and for this characteristic, it has been used in numerous applications. The interested applications its usage in Robotic Arm Controller ( RAC ). The proposed control algorithm involves the control of SM speed, direction ( both clockwise & counter-clockwise ), and the number of step of rotation. The SM that is proposed to be controlled in experimental is four phase ( 6 wires ), with hybrid coil category, unipolar connection of stator winding, 24V rated voltage, 1.5A rated current, and it has step angle equal to 1.8º. Function Block Diagram ( FBD ) program design language is used to realize the proposed PLC control program for SM. Wave Stepping Excitation Method ( WSEM ) was employed for driving the SM.

Simple Torque Control Method for Hybrid Stepper Motors Implemented in FPGA

Stepper motors are employed in a wide range of consumer and industrial applications. Their use is simple: a digital device generates pulse-bursts and a direction bit towards a power driver that produces the 2-phase currents feeding the motor windings. Despite its simplicity, this open-loop approach fails if the torque load exceeds the motor capacity, so the motor and driver should be oversized at the expense of efficiency and cost. Field-Oriented closed-loop Control (FOC) solves the problem, and the recent availability of low cost electronics devices like Digital Signal Processors, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), or even Microcontrollers with dedicated peripherals, fostered the investigation and implementation of several variants of the FOC method. In this paper, a simple and economic FOC torque control method for hybrid stepper motors is presented. The load angle is corrected accordingly to the actual shaft position through pulse-bursts and direction commands issued towards a commercial stepper driver, which manages the 2-phase winding currents. Thanks to the FPGA implementation, the control loop updates the electrical position every 50 μs only, thus allowing a load angle accuracy of −1/100 rad for a rotor velocity up to 750 rev/min, as shown in the reported experiments.

Designing CCTV Working Optimization System as Room Security Using Passive Infrared (PIR) Sensor Based on AT89S52 Microcontroller

A CCTV optimization system has been designed using PIR (passive infrared) sensor based on AT89S52 microcontroller. This device consists of several series of sensor circuit, AT89S52 microcontroller minimum system, stepper motor driver circuit, push-on circuit and alarm circuit. The working system of the room safety device is when the PIR (passive infrared) sensor detects the movement of the object, then the output of the sensor is forwarded to the microcontroller, the microcontroller will process and convey to the driver circuit to drive the stepper motors that moves the CCTV. The push-on circuit is connected to the microcontroller port for controlling the movement of the stepper motor so it won’t rotate beyond 180 degrees, and for the safety of the room, an alarm circuit is connected to the microcontroller port as an alarming sound generator.

SISTEM KONTROL PADA ROBOT PEMINDAH BARANG TIPE CARTESIAN CORDINAT MENGGUNAKAN ARDUINO UNO R3

Robots are an option to help human jobs address issues of precision, security and flexibility. The robot<br />arm becomes one of the robot types that can help human work. The robot arm controller research is<br />to control the stepper motor's motion according to the command. Desai this cartesian coordinate<br />robot is 2 axis that is X and Y axis. Control of this robot arm using Visual Basic 6.0 programming for<br />controlled robot from PC to arduino Uno R3. Motor driver used is IC A4988, stepper motor movement<br />got input from PC with software visual basic 6.0. to move the stepper motor. Data sent from PC to<br />Arduino Uno R3 is a command from Visial Basic 6.0 with serial communication. The microcomputer<br />reads the serial data input and sends a step value data to the stepper motor driver to move the robot<br />arm. The end result of the robot arm controller research that has been achieved is the robot arm can<br />be controlled with the command to enter the distance that will be run by stepper motor as the<br />method of pemograman which is controlled through serial communication with Visual Basic 6.0. The<br />test results show an average error 22.26531 for the left and 52.61111 for the right direction on X axis<br />while for Y axis -5,36957 for the downward direction and 0.117647 for the upper direction

Load angle estimation for dynamic stepping motor motion applications

Stepping motors are well-suited for open-loop positioning tasks at low power. Every time the user sends a next pulse, the stepping motor driver excites the correct stator phases to rotate the rotor over a predefined discrete angular position. In that way, counting the step command pulses enables open-loop positioning. However, when the motor is overloaded or stuck, step loss occurs, and the relation between the expected rotor position and the actual rotor position is lost. Nowadays, the vast majority of the open-loop stepping motor methodologies do not detect this step loss. Especially for dynamically demanding applications where the stepping motor is used close to its operating boundaries, step loss is highly probable. Using a mechanical position sensor to detect and counteract step loss would increase the overall cost, the size of the machine, complexity of the system. Therefore in this paper, a dynamic sensorless load angle estimator based on the classical Transfer Function Analyzer (TFA) technique in the angular domain is presented. This load angle reflects the capability of the system to follow the position setpoint and gives an indication of the robustness against torque disturbances. The algorithm needs no tuning and can be used with the conventional full-, half- and micro-stepping algorithm. The estimation algorithm only needs one current and one voltage measurement and the electrical parameters of the stator winding to estimate the load angle. The proposed algorithm is validated through measurements on a hybrid stepping motor.

Driver for 5-phase stepper motor pentagon connection with dedicated ICs

Stepper motors are very well suited for positioning applications since they can achieve very good positional accuracy without complicated feedback loops associated with servo systems. In this paper, an intelligent five-phase stepper motor driver of business card size proposed. Constant current chopping technique was applied for the purposes of high torque, high velocity and high efficiency. The driver was designed to drive a middle-sized hybrid stepper motor with wire current rating from 0.7 to 1.4A. An up-to-dated translator of five-phase stepping motor was used to drive the gates of N- channel MOSFET (Low side N-channel MOSFET Array) and level shift for NPN Darlington transistor (High side PNP Darlington transistor). The resolution in full/half mode is 0.72/0.36 degrees/step. Moreover, an automatic power down circuit was used to limit the power consuming as the motor stops. Additionally, a self-testing program embedded in an 80C31-CPU (PCL838) can self-test whether the driver is normal or not. This embedded program including linear acceleration and deceleration routines also can serve as a positioning controller. The dimension of this driver is approximate 90x70x40 millimeters, which is smaller than a business card. Experimental results demonstrate that the responses of the driver can reach 60 kilo pulses per second.

Implementation of Closed-Loop Stepper Motor Driver Based on Lead Angle Estimation

Implementation of Closed-Loop Stepper Motor Driver Based on Lead Angle Estimation

Development of a novel radiotherapy motion phantom using a stepper motor driver circuit and evaluation using optical surface scanning.

Recent developments in radiotherapy have focused on the management of patient motion during treatment. Studies have shown that significant gains in treatment quality can be made by 'gating' certain treatments, simultaneously keeping target coverage, and increasing separation to nearby organs at risk (OAR). Motion phantoms can be used to simulate patient breathing motion and provide the means to perform quality control (QC) and quality assurance (QA) of gating functionality as well as to assess the dosimetric impact of motion on individual patient treatments. The aim of this study was to design and build a motion phantom that accurately reproduces the breathing motion of patients to enable end-to-end gating system quality control of various gating systems as well as patient specific quality assurance. A motion phantom based on a stepper motor driver circuit was designed. The phantom can be programmed with both real patient data from an external gating system and with custom signals. The phantom was programmed and evaluated with patient data and with a square wave signal to be tracked with a Sentinel™ (C-Rad, Uppsala, Sweden) motion monitoring system. Results were compared to the original curves with respect to amplitude and phase. The comparison of patient curve data showed a mean error value of -0.09mm with a standard deviation of 0.24mm and a mean absolute error of 0.29mm. The square wave signals could be reproduced with a mean error value of -0.03mm, a standard deviation of 0.04mm and a mean absolute error of 0.13mm. Breathing curve data acquired from an optical scanning system can be reproduced accurately with the help of the in-house built motion phantom. The phantom can also be programmed to follow user designed curve data. This offers the potential for QC of gating systems and various dosimetric quality control applications.

Laser Triangulation in 3-Dimensional Granulometric Analysis

Abstract The measurement of the particle size distribution plays an important role in mineral processing. Due to the high costs and time-consumption of the screening process, modern machine vision methods based on the acquisition and analysis of recorded photographic images. But the image analysis methods used so far, do not provide information on the three-dimensional shape of the grain. In the coal industry, the application scope of these methods is substantially limited by the low reflectivity of the black coal particle surface. These circumstances hinder proper segmentation of coal stream surface image. The limited information contained in two-dimensional image of the raw mineral stream surface, makes it difficult to identify proper size of grains partially overlapped by other particles and skewed particles. Particle height estimation based on the shadow length measurement becomes very difficult in industrial environment because of the fast movement of the conveyor belt and because of spatial arrangement of these particles, usually touching and overlapping. Method of laser triangulation connected with the movement of the conveyor belt makes it possible to create three-dimensional depth maps. Application of passive triangulation methods (e.g. stereovision) can be impeded because of the low contrast of the black coal on the black conveyor belt. This forces the use of active triangulation methods, directly identifying position of the analyzed image pixel. High contrast of the image can be obtained by a direct pointwise laser lighting. For the simultaneous identification of the entire section of the raw material stream it is useful to apply a linear laser (a planar sheet of the laser light). There have been presented basic formulas for conversion of pixel position on the camera CCD matrix to the real-word coordinates. A laboratory stand has been described. This stand includes a linear laser, two high-definition (2Mpix) cameras and stepper motor driver. The triangulation head moves on the rails along the belt conveyor section. There have been compared acquired depth maps and photographic images. Depth maps much better describe spatial arrangement of coal particles, and have a much lower noise level resulting from the specular light reflections from the shiny fragments of the particle surface. This makes possible an identification of the coal particles partially overlapped by other particles and obliquely arranged particles. It enables a partial elimination or compensation of image disturbances affecting the final result of the estimated particle size distribution. Because of the possibility of the reflected laser beam overriding by other particles it is advantageous to use a system of two cameras. Results of the experimental research confirmed the usefulness of the described method in spite of low reflectance factor of coal surface. The fast detection of changes in particle size distribution makes possible an on-line optimization of complex technological systems - especially those involving coal cleaning in jigs - thus leading to better stabilization of quality parameters of the enrichment output products. An additional application of the described method can be achieved by measuring the total volume of the stream of the transported materials. Together with the measurement signal from the belt conveyor weight it makes possible to estimate the bulk density of the raw mineral stream. The low complexity of the signal processing in the laser triangulation method is associated with the acquisition of high contrast images and analysis based on simple trigonometric dependencies.

Design of Embedded Microcontroller for Controlling and Monitoring Blood Pump

Abstract The peristaltic pump has a vital role for transporting the blood in the extracorporeal circuit of hemodialysis machine. Such a pump consits of a stepper motor, gear box and rotor shaft with two roller attached on it. The transported volume of the pump depends on the tube segment pressed by roller. Therefore, the deviation in the amount of delivered fluid may occurs. It is a problem when it is used in the medical device with high accuracy requirements such as hemodialysis machine. To overcome such a problem, the transport of fluid need to be controlled. The aim of this work was to design and implement of an embedded microcontroller for controlling and monitoring fluid transport in the peristaltic pump. An electronic hardware which consists of STM32F4 development board, stepper motor driver circuit, current sensor, magnetic sensor and arterial presure sensor circuits was developed in parallel with embedded software development. The embedded sofware consists of routines for monitoring current sensor, pressure sensor, and magnetic sensor, as well as routines for pump speed controller. The STM32F4 board which consits of ARM Cortex M4F microcontroller was chosen because of the trade off between price, performance, and low power consumption. The peristaltic pump system was tested with the mixture of water and glycerin with certain composisition and having viscosity simular to human blood. The validation was also be performed by comparing the results with the measurement conducted using turbine flow meter. The results shows that the performance of the controller is working as expected.

Researches on the Design and Application of DSP Multi-Motor Collaborative Control System

As an important branch in the field of servo control, multi-motor coordination motion control applications are increasingly widespread. For open CNC system requirement, taking DSP as master core, combing with specific integrated stepper motor driver chip LMD18201T, this designed a serial communication-based new collaborative multi-motor control system, which has characters of highly integrated, good stability, real-time, convenient man-machine interface. The test results show that the system fully meet performance requirements and achieved the motion control functions.

Design for the Controller of Desktop 3D Printer

3D printing, is a kind of rapid prototyping manufacturing, fabricating expected objects by way of cumulative constructed layer by layer, based on digital model files and powdered materials used. In this paper, the controller of desktop 3D printer is designed and carried out, both from the hardware and software part. For hardware design, a 32-bit ARM core microcontroller, STM32F103VB is selected as the core, supplemented by stepper motor driver chips, thermocouple digital converters and other devices, which build a desktop 3D printer controller panel. For software design, referred to open-source design being based on the AVR microcontroller, the whole process of 3D printing is accomplished by programming the ARM core microcontroller.

Study of Subdivision Stepping Motor Driver Based on the Controllable Dead-Time Compensation

In order to improve the step accuracy of two-phase hybrid stepping motors, this paper presents a high-performance stepping motor driver based on controllable dead-time compensation. After CPLD(Complex Programmable Logic Device) logical processing, the subdivision drive signal created by microcontroller STM32 becomes a complementary dead-time compensation drive signal which can realize precise control of stepper motor. The experiment shows that this program not only has effectively reduced the power consumption of the stepping motor, but also made whole system cost less.

A Study of Development of a Dedicated Control IC for a Five Phase Stepper Motor Driver

Abstract Stepper motors are very well suited for positioning applications since they can achieve very good positional accuracy without complicated feedback loops associated with servo systems. In this paper, an intelligent five-phase stepping motor driver of business card size proposed. Constant current chopping technique was applied for the purposes of high torque, high velocity and high efficiency. The driver was designed to drive a middle-sized hybrid stepping motor with wire current rating from 0.4 to 1.5A. An up-to-dated translator of five-phase stepping motor was used to drive the gates of N- channel MOSFET array. The resolution in full/half mode is 0.72/0.36 degrees/step. Moreover, an automatic power down circuit was used to limit the power consuming as the motor stops. Additionally, a self-testing program embedded in a 80C31-CPU (PCL838) can self-test whether the driver is normal or not. This embedded program including linear acceleration and deceleration routines also can serve as a positioning controller. The dimension of this driver is approximate 70x65x35 millimeters, which is smaller than a business card. Experimental results demonstrate that the responses of the driver can reach 65 kilo pulses per second.

Unipolar Fixed-current Chopper – 4 Phase Stepper Motor Driver System

Abstract This paper presents unipolar fixed – current chopper- 4 phase stepping motor driver, are remarkable for simplicity, high – reliability, multifunctional facilities for four phases hybrid stepper motor. The unipolar stepper motor controller/driver are designed which uses dedicated hybrid IC (HIC) which uses a MOSFET power device. The dedicated IC has the features of the SLA 7024 M or STK 6713BMK3, plus a simultaneous input prevention circuit that protects the IC from any malfunction the excitation signal. Self-excitation design means chopping frequency is determined by motor R and L. Support chopping at 20 kHz or higher, very low number of external components required. Excitation sequence signal is active low, and TTL level for direct interfacing to the microcomputer and gate array.

High Performance Microstepping Driver System based on Five-phase Stepper Motor (sine wave drive)

Abstract This paper presents the implementation of microstepping in five – phase hybrid stepper motor. The proposed drive system, in microstepping mode, achieves standard full step angles on five – phase stepper motor in the range of 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 20, and 40. Low vibration, low noise and improved controllability are achieved using microstepping. A dedicated new lower cost 5 phase pentagon stepping motor controller IC was developed to create a small but powerful package for use in high volume applications. This IC has all the drive functions of a sequencer and can control motor phase currents accurately and efficiently. The step motor driver circuitry consists of four parts as follows: micro-step sequencer, pre-driver and current control, P-channel MOS array and N-channel MOS array. The paper presents the operation of the system in both clockwise and counter clockwise direction at various speeds which is an important need in the field of robotics, automation engineering and textile industries