The team at Microprocessor Designs worked on a system of stepper-motor controllers designed for a metal 3-D printer. The motor controllers were tasked with driving the 3 axis of the printer heads as well as the motors whose responsibility was to drop print media into the print head. Microprocessor Designs also created a system control computer that distributes step and direction signals to the motor controllers. Additionally the system control computer was responsible for reporting status of the motor controllers which it periodically queried over a CAN bus.
In parallel to the controller designs the team created the test fixtures and software used for functional validation of the control boards on the production line.
The µPD team developed a 2 and 4 amp stepper motor controller drivers. The stepper motor controllers are based on Freescales 56F83xx series DSP and allows for fine microstepping control under program control. The units implement current control and can sustain 80V continuous operation.
The BLDC controller is a tiny, 6mm wide x 34 mm long PCB assembly based on an Atmel ATmega series microcontroller. A half duplex one-wire asynchronous interface is used to send commands to the BLDC controller/driver, thereby abstracting the complexity of BLDC drive from the system level programmer. See the Parker Smart Syringe.