This thesis was suggested to me by a client during recent work experience. He actually wants to use the design for some drilling machines. Dr Mark Shulz decided that he would be the supervising lecturer for this project.

My thesis will involve the construction of an 8 (or more) channel motor controller. The controller will plug directly into a PC and will have its own processor. Each motor's position will be determined on a 32-bit counter and the output from the controller will be a voltage generated on a 16-bit DAC. Here is a simple block diagram of the system:

The processor will have several operations that it will need to perform. Each channel will have PID control worked out on the processor. The motors will also require ramping functions to bring them up to top speed and to slow them back down. The client for this project has some other functions that he would like me to include if I have time. These include:

• Circle algorithms to draw circles with 2 synchronised motors.
• A function to automatically set forwards and reverse from the encoder
• A function to automatically set the PID variables to a specification. eg. no overshoot