Design of an I/o Card to Drive Stepper Motors for Computer Aided Control of a Robot Arm

Developments in electronic and computer technology area have increased the importance of computer aided control. The control systems in frequent use are microprocessor control, microcontroller control and the computer aided control. Computer aided control can be implemented by serial port, parallel port or control cards prepared by special purposes. In this paper, a control card to use in computer aided control system to control of the degrees of freedom of a robot arm moving in three dimensional space is designed. For the control, address decoder device, programmable input/output device, four stepper motor driver and stepper motor breaking device are placed on only one control card which is placed in one of the 16 bits ISA slots of computer. On the control card prepared, 48 bits input/output lines are available. 17 of these lines are used as output lines and the rest of the lines are reserved for feedback.