A Low Cost Embedded Control System of Step Motor and Its Application

The step motor is a kind of electric actuator that transfers electrical pulses to angular displacement. How to fulfill the control task of step motor by embedded control system is a practical problem since the common computer control system has a higher cost and more redundant than the customized embedded control system. A dual-ARM7 microcontroller embedded structure is developed in this paper to keep the real-time performance, reliability and low cost. One of the ARM controllers is responsible for human-computer interaction, and the other one is dedicated to motion control. Based on this low cost platform an industrial stationary length controller is developed. The two kinds of new velocity profiles are designed and implemented. The application result shows that the embedded control system developed in this paper improves the step motor system performance and achieves low cost purpose.