Development of digital control system in LabVIEW for stepper motor drives

A digital control system has been developed for three dimensional (or less) motion control applications using three sets of stepper motors, drive controller and encoder on RS485 4-wire communication interface. This system is simple to program, economical and flexible to enhance. The communication protocol is a customized ASCII protocol for control and monitoring of essential parameters on serial communication. It is an example of handling systems which are based on serial communication and simple communication artifacts. It also demonstrates an integration of system using modern data flow programming such as LabVIEW. This development is capable of handling 3-axis motion (or less) when coupled with the suitable mechanical structure. Although, this development is carried out, keeping in mind the motion control applications of a laboratory plasma device, called as large volume plasma device (LVPD) but this can also be used for any other experimental system in general. The paper discusses the requirements, software and hardware architecture, obtained results and future application perspectives.