A reconfigurable wireless stepper motor controller based on FPGA implementation

This paper proposes a wireless stepper motor controller designed using Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language (VHDL) and is implemented on Spartan 3E Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The proposed controller uses the Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) technique to rotate the motor through the desired angle, speed and direction with a latent time of 10 ms. Using the proposed controller it is possible to rotate the stepper motor precisely to an angle of 0.0001152°. In addition, the motor can be operated with a speed ranging from 1° per second to 20° per second in either clockwise or anticlockwise direction. Features such as manual rotation, to rotate the motor in directional and oscillational mode, to pause the rotation, to execute the rotation with varying speed at desired region, return-to-zero, zero position detection have been incorporated in the design. This proposed controller has been designed to operate wirelessly. It has been practically realized that the remote system successfully operates even for a distance that is 70 meters apart from the controller. More over the complete controller can be redesigned and realized in hardware rapidly. Thus, it is easily possible to customize the controller for any industrial applications. The simulation and experimental results of the proposed system have been presented.