Affordable Servo Control

   Back in 1993 I decided to build myself a PC based CNC controlled milling machine Because someone had given me a Galil DMC620 2 axis motion control card. While the card was awesome at moving motors very accurately from point A to point B, I had problems getting it to work in a CNC type application. By now I was hooked and had to have a CNC machine but was poor, I decided to design my own. After much research I decided that the my design would depend on two main things, choice of motor and the communication method used to talk to the controller.

   I decided that I liked the concept of the computer doing the position calculations as opposed to a special plug in motion control board. Why not take advantage of the power of an old PC which you can get for next to nothing or free?. I also liked the idea of a truly open architecture using the computers printer port to communicate with the controllers by means of step and direction pulses. To me using step and direction pulses to control the motors seems to make more sense than using proprietary hardware and software for control. Another reason for going the step and direction route is the fact that you have a lot more choices when it comes to software that can read industry standard gcode and interface with the controller.

   I call the design I came up with Servo Lite and the circuit description is as follows. Two synchronous 8 bit  binary up down counters, one fed by the computer the other from the incremental encoder mounted on the shaft of the motor, feed into a digital subtracter that takes the difference between the counters and generates an error signal. To  improve performance the error signal is processed with a analogue PID filter and then sent to a comparator that compares the error signal with a triangle wave.  The output of the comparator is a square wave of varying duty cycle and is the drive signal for a PWM amp that drives the motor. In other words the computer sends out a control signal, in the form of step and direction pulses, and the  encoders on the motors provide the feedback signal for the servo controller. One  area that my controller falls short of the more expensive control boards is it only has an 8 bit counter, compared to 24 or 32 bits of an expensive servo  board. This has the effect of only being able to control position error up to +/- 127 encoder or computer pulses. When pushed past these limits the motor  slips like a stepper motor does when under load except instead of 1.8 deg. slip there will be a slip in multiples of 127 encoder pulses. This means that the amount the motor slips, or cogs, is a bit bigger step than a stepper depending  on the resolution of the encoder mounted on the motor. This motor slipping I  speak of is no problem under normal operating conditions, this is because the  error should never get close to being that big. If it does it means you are asking to much from the system and need to get bigger motors and amps or slow  the thing down. Although my servo controller is not as sophisticated as a full blown motion control card, it is more than the average hobbyist needs, and cost only as much as a stepper system that has no position feedback, if you take into account the fact that stepper motors will cost more.

Highlights

1. Made with common off the shelf components
2. Can be used to enhance more sophisticated cards
3. Can be used to distribute processing  tasks
4. Simple easy to understand and very reliable
5. Can upgrade affordable open loop  control software to closed loop.

Deficiencies

The main difference between traditional industrial controllers and Servo Lite is the fact that at low speed the industrial controllers run smoother due to the fact that they have tach feedback.  Depending on your encoder resolution this may present itself as stair stepping in a long shallow taper.  The other difference is that the industrial controllers have 32 bit counters as opposed to the 8 bit that Servo Lite has.