Client
C.P. Bourg has been provided for years solutions high speed sheet feeder that acts as a production gateway (BSF) for In-Line and Off-Line applications, and booklet making products equipment.
Their partnership with prestigious companies such as HP, Kodak, Ricoh or Xerox gives them a strong place on the market
Project
C.P. Bourg asked DELTATEC to redesign a important part present in every equipment: a multi motor driver controller. The redesign goals was using modern architecture (and modern components) to integrate in the same form-factor and versatile controller that allows to drive up to 19 DC motors or up to 9 stepper motors or 38 unipolar loads or any combination of these.
Challenge
The 2 main challenges were:
- The PCB layout that have to integrate 38 half-bridges able to drive up to 15A each on a two euro size PCB
- The software had to control stepper motors by sending up to 10000 steps information per second
To be able to driver stepper motors at high speed (10KSteps/s), the software to control the step duration according to specific speed profiles. The timing accuracy is mandatory!
Solutions
DELTATEC provides a mixed hardware (FPGA-based) and software solution. The embedded application was designed with hard real-time constrains and a set of services like CAN communication, application upgrade through SDCard.
Running on an ARM Cortex-M4 processor and a RTOS, the core application provides an efficient way to transfer steps information to a FPGA that control individually the 76 MOSFETs contained on the controller board. The FPGA decodes these “micro” commands to know how to drive each MOSFETs (On, Off or PWM). The fact that the CPU handles the command sequences allows to cover every use cases (full steps, half steps, micro stepping…)