RPM

While testing my extruder I found that the filament diameter seems to vary with temperature and pressure. I wanted to investigate this further so I decided to add a shaft encoder to the output of the small gear motor which drives the polymer pump. This would allow me to regulate the speed precisely because the micro would know the exact position of the shaft at any instant.

My first thought was to use a magnetic shaft encoder such as the AS5035 but then I remembered I had an evaluation kit for some HP reflective optical encoders which I had saved since 1995. HP are no longer in the semiconductor business, that part of the business became Agilent and these chips have been passed on to Avago. The kit had a linear encoder strip, a rotary encoder wheel and three sensor chips.


One of the advantages of magnetic encoders is that they don't need such precise alignment as the optical ones. However, in my case I would have needed to build a raised mounting to hold it over the end of the shaft, whereas the optical encoder can be mounted flush against the gearbox. Here is another bizarre mix of surface mount and through hole components. Can you spot the SMT decoupling cap?



I doubt that I have complied with the strict mounting tolerances but it seems to work well enough for this purpose. Here it is with the code wheel in place :-



Here is what the outputs look like when the shaft is turning :-



Two square waves are produced which are 90° out of phase with each other. This is known as quadrature encoding and it allows both the distance and direction of movement to be determined. I would have expected the mark space ratio to be more equal but it is probably out of spec due to me not meeting the alignment tolerances.

Notice also the nasty glitches on the bottom trace. These are commutation noise from the DC motor despite having a 100n capacitor close to it and using screened cables. Here is what the noise looks like close up without the capacitor :-



And this is the improvement with the capacitor fitted:-



I also tried adding a resistor to form an RC snubber and adding a ferrite ring around the motor cable, but both made it worse. The only way to effectively suppress DC motors is to mount suppression components directly across the armature windings, i.e. the other side of the brushes.

So stuck with that much noise, it was impossible to use an edge triggered interrupt approach, so I polled the inputs from a fast interrupt and debounced them in software. Here is the code :-

//
// Process the shaft encoder signals
//
#define DEBOUNCE 3
static void scan_optos(void)
{
static byte last_raw = 0;
static byte debounce_count = DEBOUNCE;
byte    delta;

   //
   // Debounce the inputs
   //
   byte bits = P1IN & (SHAFT_A | SHAFT_B);
   if(bits != last_raw) {
       last_raw = bits;
       debounce_count = DEBOUNCE;
       return;                             // Still changing
   }
   if(debounce_count)                      // Still debouncing
       if(--debounce_count != 0)
           return;                         // Not stable long enough
   delta = bits ^ optos;                   // Which bits changed
   if(delta) {
       int dir = 1;
       optos = bits;                       // New state
       if(delta & SHAFT_A) {               // Was it A or B that changed
           while(delta & SHAFT_B)          // If both not scanning fast enough
               ;
           dir = -dir;
       }
       if(bits & SHAFT_A)                  // Work out the direction
           dir = -dir;
       if(bits & SHAFT_B)
           dir = -dir;
       motor_pos += dir;                   // update position
   }
}

This keeps track of the shaft position: motor_pos increases as the filament advances. I then use a timer interrupt to decrement motor_pos at the rate I want the shaft to move at. motor_pos then becomes the error signal for my feed back loop. If it is positive the shaft is ahead of where it should be, if it is negative it is lagging. On-off control was too aggressive so I used PWM to give proportional control. Here is the code, called from the same fast interrupt :-

//
// Control the motor
//
#define MCYCLE  16
static void do_motor(void)
{
    static int mcount = 0;
    static int on_time = 0;

    if(mcount >= MCYCLE) {                  // At end of cycle?
        if(motor_pos <= 0) {                // If lagging                       
            on_time = -motor_pos >> 3;      // Set PWM for next cycle proportional to the lag
            mcount = 0;
        }
    }
    else
        ++mcount;
    if(motor_pos > 0 || mcount >= on_time)
        P2OUT &= ~MOTOR;                    // Motor off
    else
        P2OUT |= MOTOR;                     // Motor on
}

This is the resulting PWM waveform and one shaft encoder signal, my scope only has two channels! :-



The speed control works well, no loss of torque as the speed is reduced. It has a bit of a damped oscillation with no load due to the slop in the gearbox but it is fine in the extruder where it has a constant load to hide the backlash.

Bang bang

I implemented the simplest form of temperature control, known as bang bang control, which is just turn the heater on if it is too cold and turn it off when it is too hot. This seems to work well, here is graph to compare with the last post. The time divisions are 4 minutes.



The warm up time has reduced from about 10 minutes to just over 1.5 minutes and you can't really notice any change in temperature while it was extruding.

Here is a graph on a faster time base of 1 minute per division showing the heater control signal. This one has not been inverted so temperature is upside down.



As you can see there is some ripple on the temperature of the order of about 10°C. I could probably improve that with PID control but I don't know if it will make much difference to the build quality. I might do it as an exercise out of interest as I have not implemented PID before.

There is a lot of noise in the system, which is not surprising with wires all over the place. It should get better when I make a PCB or veroboard version and mount it near the extruder. Fortunately glitches don't really matter because the thermal time constant smooths it all out.

The next task is to link it to the main controller and see if I can get accurate temperature readings back from it.

Heatwave

I made a start on my extruder controller, on breadboard, as it is a bit experimental. As you can see it's is a strange mixture of surface mount and though hole technologies!



The little PCB on the far right is a 3.3V regulator which I hacked out of a scrap PCB complete with all its decoupling caps. It had three handy vias for the three connections I had to make. The rest of the parts are the heater controller. The circuit could not be simpler. The heater is switched with a BTS134 protected MOSFET. Even with only a 3.3V gate drive its on resistance is so low it does not even get warm when switching about 1.5A.

The thermistor is just wired to a potential divider which gives 0.6V with an impedance of 100Ω. That makes a voltage that varies almost linearly with temperatures between 20°C and 200°C that can go straight into an analogue channel on the MSP430F2013. The micro can also measure its own supply voltage so that can be used to null out the supply tolerance.

Here is a graph of voltage on the input, inverted as it is an NTC thermistor, so it is roughly a graph of temperature :-



The heater was driven with a fixed 50% PWM drive. The temperature rises exponentially until it reaches equilibrium after about 12 minutes. I then turned on the motor and let it extrude some plastic. You can see the temperature drops significantly and rises again when I stopped the motor. This is because the hot plastic leaving the extruder carries heat away with it. Because plastic has a very high specific heat capacity this effect is significant. Finally the temperature falls exponentially when the heater is switched off.

The graph shows why closed loop control is necessary. The rise will be much faster because full power will be applied until the target temperature is met. That will reduce the warm up time considerably. I also hope to reduce the sag that happens when extruding which will make the extruded filament more consistent.

So a little bit of software now to close the loop.