COVER STORY
Intelligent
automation for remote motion control of nodes
10
BASE-T1L is a physical layer industrial connectivity standard that covers data rates up to 10Mbps
and power delivery of distances to 1km via a standard twisted pair cable. Low latency and the PoDL capabilities allow devices such as sensors or actuators to be controlled remotely. Figure 1 shows the schematic of the system-level application. On the host side, the conversion between standard and 10BASE-T1L links is managed by the ADIN1100 and ADIN1200 Ethernet PHYs, whereas on the remote side, the controller interfaces with the link using the ADIN1110 Ethernet MAC-PHY, which only requires an SPI peripheral to exchange data and commands. Precise and synchronised motion control is accomplished with the ADI Trinamic TMC5160 stepper motor controllers and drivers that allow the generation of six-point ramps for positioning without requiring any calculation on the controller. Choosing these components also keeps requirements on the microcontroller low in terms of used peripherals, computing power and code size, allowing the use of a wide range of commercially-available products. Moreover, up to a pre-defi ned power-consumption limit, the entire remote sub-system can be directly powered from the data line, so the media converter board is the only module requiring a local power supply.
System hardware
The system comprises four diff erent boards: • The EVAL-ADIN1100 board features an ADIN1200, 10BASE-T/100BASE-T PHY, used in combination with the ADIN1100
12 November 2023 | Automation
EVAL-ADIN1110, EVAL-ADIN11X0EBZ, and TMC5160 shield assembled
By Alessandro Leonardi, Account Manager, Fulvio Bagarelli, Technical Leader, both at Analog Devices, and Giorgio Paganini, Student, Polytechnic of Milan
Figure 1: System overview
10BASE-T1L PHY, to translate messages from one physical standard to another. It can be confi gured for diff erent modes of operation. In this project, Standard Mode 15 (media converter) is used. The EVAL-ADIN1100 board also features an integrated microcontroller that performs the basic confi guration required for media conversion as well as to read diagnostic information. However, it can’t interact with sent and received messages; this board is completely transparent to the communication. • The EVAL-ADIN1110 is the core of the remote devices’ controller. The ADIN1110 10BASE-T1L MAC-PHY receives data through the 10BASE-T1L link and transfers it to an onboard Cortex-M4 microcontroller via an SPI interface for processing. This board also exposes Arduino Uno- compatible headers that can be used to install a shield, to add functionalities to the board.
• The TMC5160 shield is a custom- developed board based on the Arduino shield form factor. A single shield supports up to two TMC5160 SilentStepStick boards, and multiple shields can be stacked together to increase the maximum number of controlled motors. All the
drivers share the same SPI clock and data signals, but chip-select lines are kept independent. With this confi guration, two communication modes are possible: if chip select lines are asserted individually, the microcontroller can communicate with single controllers – for example, to confi gure motion parameters. Instead, by asserting more chip-select lines simultaneously, all selected drivers receive the same command at the same time. The latter mode is mainly used for motion synchronisation purposes. This board also provides some additional input capacitance to the StepSticks to reduce current peaks at motor start-up and to smoothen the current profi le during normal operation. This allows the use of PoDL to supply the whole system with a maximum of two NEMA17 motors (with the default setup, maximum transmitted power is 12W at 24V). The board is also used to ease the connection with stepper motors by using screw terminals to make phase outputs from the controllers more accessible. • Two EVAL-ADIN11X0EBZ boards, one for the media converter and one for the EVAL-ADIN1110EBZ, are used to add PoDL capabilities to the system. This board
automationmagazine.co.uk
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