Abstract—3D printing technology is a rapidly-evolving field, which has seen an explosion of interest in the last decade due to the influence and great degree of maker movement and the rapid prototyping. A set of specialized print control systems is the basis for the fabrication of electronic technology. The use of closed-loop control to improve performance in robots is a well-established technology, by adding the necessary sensors and computational hardware, it is easy to establish a low-cost and efficient 3D printer system. Success of a motion control systems depends not only on the controlling algorithm but also on the control hardware structure. Compared with common robot manipulators, 3D printer system has a more open-ended structure, which needs the control system to be flexible to the flexibility in 3D printer system. Based on DSP and FPGA, unique flexibility and excellent control capability of the motion controller can be designed to fit the requirements of the flexibility in 3D printer system. In this thesis, a kind of closed-loop control structure based on DSP and FPGA for 3D printer has been proposed. The main contents include: (1) the analysis of mechanical parts of common low-cost commercial 3D printer and its requirement for control system. (2) FPGA and DSP can inherently handle processes in parallel, therefore a kind of closed-loop control system has been designed to execute G-code, compute curves and accelerations, and drive multiple stepper motors simultaneously. The thesis illustrates the frame of control system, and provides the design of hardware circuits and software architecture. (3) The linear acceleration and deceleration algorithms of multi-axes have been analyzed, and the simulation results of trajectory following by closed-loop control prove the efficiency of the work in this thesis. The limited contributions of this thesis include, (1) a kind of design of hardware and software for 3D printer system based on DSP and FPGA; (2) the analysis of motion control of the multi-axes implemented in this control architecture. The platform developed seeks to increase awareness of the potential for the integration of closed-loop control into existing open source designs and will help to improve the performance of the low-cost 3D printer system.

Index Terms—3D printer, motion control, FPGA, DSP, stepper motor, closed loop

Cite: Dima Younes, Tan Yuegang, Cheng Xin, Essa Alghannam, and Amjad Altazah, "Design of Control System for 3D Printer Based On DSP and FPGA," Journal of Automation and Control Engineering, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 40-46, June, 2018. doi: 10.18178/joace.6.1.40-46