At the end of the 2008, we've got request to make thermoforming machine for furniture manufacturing company. Some facts about this heavy thing:

1) Aluminium design for Corian® Montelli material forming.

1) Total mass: ~250 kg. Moving part's mass ~110 kg.

2) Switchable power between 12 kW and 16 kW.

3) Temperature control at 1 C resolution.

4) Operating temperature range: +25 C to 220 C.

5) Only one man required to operate the machine. Thanks to automatic lift mechanism.

6) Unit price 6000 $. Compared existing unit at the market - 18000 $.

Also you can see video attached to this article.

This stepper motor control application is based on L298 power stage IC. Double sided factory made PCB's will be shown latter. Clock, and direction signals are generated by ARM7 LPC2131 board from previous project. L297 IC is responsible for generating stepper motor phases sequence, timings. L298 is a power stage, which basicaly is two H bridges, enabling to drive DC or stepper motor. My new PCB has two L298, L297 is replaced by atmega64 AVR microcontroller. I hope I'll find time to document and publish this project. Right now this is what I have:

Attachments:

2SD718.pdf	[ ]	642 Kb
L297.pdf	[ ]	166 Kb
l298.pdf	[ ]	597 Kb
motor.txt	[ ]	0 Kb
nema23.jpg	[ ]	62 Kb