www.ijraset.com Vol.

2 Issue IV, April 2014

ISSN: 2321-9653

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR RESEARCH IN AP PLIED SCIENCE

AN D E N G I N E E R I N G T E C H N O L O G Y (I J R A S E T)

FPGA based Stepper motor control using

Labview GUI techniques
Priya D#1, PG Scholar
Mrs.P.Deepa#2, Assistant Professor
Prof.R.Sankar#3, Prof.A.Srinivasula reddy#4
#
Department of EEE, Anna University
S.K.R Engineering College, Chennai-600 123

Abstract The control techniques for the Stepper motor system in wireless mode using Hardware Description Language (VHDL)
for solar tracking system is designed in which due to no mechanical brakes and lower torque (unique torque characteristics). Higher
precision of stepper motor is achieved by implementing the techniques and controlled through SPARTAN 3E SRAM based Field
Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) controller. The motor is controlled using PWM technique which produces the accurate current
pulses to the motor windings to excite. The control parameters are implemented by GUI using LabVIEW platform which is sent
through Bluetooth to the controller by which the motor can be controlled in either direction or any angle of rotation. These types of
controlling techniques can be implemented in many fields of robot applications. The Simulation design and hardware setup are
executed successfully.

Index Terms Solar panel, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), Stepper Motor, Motion Control, Wireless Motor Control,
Reconfigurable Motor Controller

I. INTRODUCTION N = Total number of poles for all phases together

They consist of two main components namely:

Very high speed hardware description language is implemented in
Stator (holds multiple windings/phases) and Rotor
Xilinx Spartan 3E to control the wireless stepper motor using
(magnetized and Non- magnetized. The controlled movement
Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) techniques. The PWM technique
is achieved and thus they are used to control rotation angle,
is used to control the stepper motor with high precision by
speed and position. Applications are printers, plotters, hard
imposing the current pulses to the motor. The Stepper motor has
disk drives, medical equipment, etc. No feedback
the property of achieving high torque which leads the motor to
information about position is needed for the open loop
sustain any big panels. The rotors stable stop position is in
control of the stepper motor since it is controlled accurately
synchronization with the stator flux which means it is a
in this mode of operation. Thus they eliminate the usage of
synchronous electrical motor. Rotating the stator flux makes the
expensive sensing and feedback devices such as optical
rotor to move towards new position. Thus the step in the motor is
encoders.
known as step angle.
A user friendly GUI designed using LabVIEW
Step Angle = 360 (Nr P) = 360 /N
to implement the control measures for the stepper motor.
Where To control the control measures the reprogrammable field
programmable gate array (FPGA) is used to meet any
Nr = Number of rotor poles specification of application. In the proposed system Very
High Speed Hardware Description Language (VHDL) is used
P = Number of phases which is user-friendly and independent technology portable to
digital design.

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ISSN: 2321-9653

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR RESEARCH IN AP PLIED SCIENCE

AN D E N G I N E E R I N G T E C H N O L O G Y (I J R A S E T)
The solar panel is tracked according to the precision according to the user choice by changing the code depends
rotation of the stepper motor and thus the energy is stored in upon the condition. Thus the system is less cost, simple
the storage battery which is taken into the robotic application and easy to implement. In this system PWM technique is
where the robot is accessed using the available storage energy. used to control the motor precise and to precisely position
with good resolution value.

III. STEPPER MOTOR

There are three types of stepper motor: 1. Variable

reluctance stepper motor 2.Permanent-magnet stepper
motor 3.Hybrid stepper motor.

Fig.1. Block diagram.

In this proposed paper Session 2 explains the previous work,
Session 3 defines the Stepper motor model, Session 4 Bluetooth
function, Session 5 VHDL design and programming techniques,
Session 6 functions of LabVIEW, Session 7 the proposed system
output and Session 8 Concludes the paper.

II.PREVIOUS WORK

The Stepper motor control implemented in 8051 and PIC

microcontroller (AT89S52) are used only for certain
applications because of the use of three-phase pulse
generation technique which makes the increased execution
time [1]. The control of stepper motor in open-loop using
FPGA leads to usage of number of components which made
the system more complex and cost effective[2] also for Figure 2: Stepper Motor Model
the precise position control Analog to digital converter
(ADC) is used to produce the sampling time. Logibricks IV. FPGA SPARTAN 3E
implemented stepper motor control which uses DSP module
The Spartan-3E family of Field-Programmable Gate
to produce the control angular direction and angular
Arrays (FPGAs) is specifically designed to meet the needs
displacement [3]. The novel stepper motor controller
of high volume, cost-sensitive consumer electronic
based on FPGA uses velocity profile to control the
applications. The five-member family offers densities
stepper motor [4]. The cost-effective PWM technique based
ranging from 100,000 to 1.6 million system gates, as shown
on FPGA is proposed in this paper which controls the
in Table 1.
stepper motor through GUI. The wireless technology is used
to send the control signals to the FPGA controller which
consists of over 700-thousands of flip-flops in which SRAM
based FPGA chip. Thus the design can be implemented

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Figure 3: Structure of an Entity.

Table 1: Summary of Spartan 3E family attributes
In VHDL programming the flow control like if and switch
The Spartan-3E family builds on the success of the earlier case is used.
Spartan-3 family by increasing the amount of logic per I/O,
significantly reducing the cost per logic cell. New features Xilinx ISE (Integrated Software Environment) is a
improve system performance and reduce the cost of software tool produced by Xilinx for synthesis and analysis
configuration. These Spartan-3E FPGA enhancements, combined of HDL designs, enabling the developer to synthesize
with advanced 90 nm process technology, deliver more ("compile") their designs, perform timing analysis, examine
functionality and bandwidth per dollar. RTL diagrams, simulate a design's reaction to different
stimuli, and configure the target device with the programmer.
Xilinx Software is used to simulate the VHDL programs for
the proposed system.
V. VHDL DESIGN AND PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
VI. BLUETOOTH FUNCTION
VHDL stands for very high-speed integrated circuit hardware
description language. This is one of the programming languages Bluetooth is a low cost, low power, radio
used to model a digital system by dataflow, behavioral and frequency technology for short-range communications. It
structural style of modeling. can be used to replace the cables connecting
portable/fixed electronic devices, build ad-hoc networks.
VHDL Structure:
Frequency 2.4GHz ISM band, Frequency
Library - Definitions, constants
Modulation hopping shaped BFSK
Gaussian
Entity - Interface
Data rate 723Kbps
Architecture - Implementation, function Operating range 10m~100m
Power 0.1W (Active)
In VHDL an entity is used to describe a hardware Security Good. FHSS. Link layer
module. An entity can be described using,
authentication and encryption
1. Entity declaration. Table 2: Bluetooth Summary
2. Architecture.
VII. FUNCTIONS OF LABVIEW
3. Configuration

4. Package declaration. LabVIEW is known as Virtual Instruments (VI) because their

appearance and operation imitate actual instruments.
5. Package body.

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It consists of

Front Panel

Block diagram

The front panel is the user interface of the VI. You build the
front panel with controls and indicators, which are the
interactive input and output terminals of the VI, respectively.
Controls are knobs, pushbuttons, dials, and other input devices.
Indicators are graphs, LEDs, and other displays. Controls
simulate instrument input devices and supply data to the block
diagram of the VI. Indicators simulate instrument output devices
and display data the block diagram acquires or generates. The Figure 5: RTL Schematic of the proposed system
block diagram contains this graphical source code. Front
panel objects appear as terminals on the block diagram.
Additionally, the block diagram contains functions and
structures from built-in LabVIEW VI libraries. Wires connect
each of the nodes on the block.

Figure 6: Timing Graph of the proposed System

IX. APPLICATION

The main application of the proposed system is robotic

Figure 4: Proposed System LabVIEW front panel control and implementation. The robot is accessed by the
solar energy and controlled through Microcontroller.

X. CONCLUSION
VIII. PROPOSED SYSTEM OUTPUT

In digital, circuit design register-transfer level (RTL) is a design Thus the proposed paper proposes the control techniques
abstraction which models a synchronous digital circuit in terms of for the stepper motor to achieve the precise control through
the flow of digital signals (data) between hardware registers, and the wireless network. LabVIEW based GUI technique is
the logical operations performed on those signals. An RTL used in order to control the motor and to reduce the cost to
description is usually converted to a gate-level description of the implement and make the control user-friendly.
circuit by a logic synthesis tool. The synthesis results are then
used by placement and routing tools to create a physical layout. The proposed system can be implemented any industrial
applications to achieve high resolution stepping functions.

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ISSN: 2321-9653

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR RESEARCH IN AP PLIED SCIENCE

AN D E N G I N E E R I N G T E C H N O L O G Y (I J R A S E T)
XI. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I wish to express my deep sense of gratitude and sincere thanks
to our Professor and Head of the Department, for their
encouragement, timely help and advice offered to me. I am very
grateful to my guide, who has guided with inspiring dedication,
untiring efforts and tremendous enthusiasm in making this
project successful and presentable. I would like to extend by
sincere thanks to my parents and friends for guiding me to do the
project successfully.

XII. REFERENCES

[1] H.B. Ling, The Design of Constant Torque Micro-stepper

Driving Circuit for Stepping Motors Based on AT89C51,
Electronic Engineer, vol. 11, no.14, 2002, pp.56-61

[2] Ngoc Quy Le and Jai Wook Jeon, An Open-loop Stepper

Motor Driver Based on FPGA International Conference on
Control, Automation and Systems 2007, Oct. 17-20, 2007

[3] ZhaoJin Wen, Weihai Chen and Zhiyue Xu and Jianhua

Wang, Analysis of Two-Phase Stepper Motor Driver Based
on FPGA, 2006 IEEE International Conference on Industrial
Informatics, page 821-826

[4] Daniel Carrica, Marcos A. Funes and Sergio A. Gonzalez,

Novel Stepper Motor Controller Based on FPGA

Implementation, IEEE/ASME Transactions On Mechatronics,
Vol 8, No. 1, March 2003

[5] Stepper Motor, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepper_motor

[7] Nandha Kumar Thulasiraman., Haider A.F Mohamed &
Yearp Soo Cheng "A Reconfigurable Wireless Stepper Motor
Controller Based On FPGA Implementation, IEEE symposium
on industrial Electronic and Applications, pp.585-

590, October 3-5, 2010.

[6] Logibricks

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