Stepper Motor Indexer & Decoder
ECE 476: Spring 2005

Daniel Beer, dbb28
Tony Lloyd, aml54
 

Introduction | High Level | Hardware Design | Software Design
Results | Pictures | Conclusion | Appendices
 

1. Introduction

For our final project we built an ATmega32 based stepper motor controller which measures the angular position of the motor shaft using an optical encoder and quadrature decoder. Our system performs 3 basic functions:

(1) Communicate with a PC by means of a RS-485 interface, and
(2) Generates step and direction signals for a US digital MD1 microstep drive, and
(3) Monitors the stepper motor rotor shaft by means of an optical encoder.

Shown above is a basic block diagram of our system with the circled numbers corresponding to the 3 basic functions above. We built block B, the ATmega32 controller.