Design of Control System for 3D Printer Based On DSP and FPGA Dima Younes School of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, China Email: dima_dy@yahoo.com Tan Yuegang, Cheng Xin, Essa Alghannam, and Amjad Altazah School of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, China School of Information Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, China Email: {ygtan, chengx, essaalghannam} @ whut.edu.cn and amjad_wuhanligon@yahoo.com 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 Manuscript received February 21, 2018; revised April 23, 2018. I. INTRODUCTION Controlling our environment and the things around us has been one of the fundamental goals and one of the greatest achievements of the human endeavor. The motion controller acts as the brain of the driving system by taking the desired target positions and motion profiles and then creating the trajectories for the motors to follow, which is a numerical control instrument in general. Unique flexibility and excellent control capability of the motion controller results in effective application of lots of industrial instruments. Benefit from the development of high performance and high speed processor such as digital signal processor DSP and programmable logic device FPGA, motion control technology is enormously enhanced [1]. A Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based system is a great hardware platform to support the implementation of controllers such as PID controller, fuzzy controller, adaptive controller, optimum controller, FIR filter and even neuro network system [2], [3]. The system developed by Takahashi and Goetz [4] could run a current control algorithm with a Xilinx FPGA to increase the bandwidth of the current loop control. Tzou and Kuo [5] performed the vector and velocity controls of a PMAC servo motor by using FPGA technology successfully. Other works on FPGA based motion controls include Paramasivam [6], Bielewicz [7] PID control was used as the control algorithm in these works. The controlling of speed is also one of the important portions in motion control. In particular, it refers to acceleration and (or) deceleration controlling. Daniel Carrica [8] has proposed a recursion algorithm for applied on FPGA, the algorithm proposed avoided the complexity in computations but at the same time increased the loads on digital device. Ngoc Quy Le [9] also proposed an algorithm for controlling variable speed and it has been implemented on DSP by using the closed- loop technique. For this algorithm, the control precision has been improved, but it was just tested in lab without any loads connected to the stepper motor, besides the 40 Journal of Automation and Control Engineering Vol. 6, No. 1, June 2018 ©2018 Journal of Automation and Control Engineering doi: 10.18178/joace.6.1.40-46