The Teletrac Spinstand

First Posted June 7, 2004
Updated July 31, 2013

    This is the spinstand project I worked on when I was at Teletrac.  What you see here are the prototypes for the controller and the spinstand.  I did not really have much to do with the spinstand, as that was mostly a mechanical engineering job.  But, I did design the spindle controller.



    The thing was pretty beat up when this picture was taken.  But it does work.  The bearings in the rotary actuator were shot (the rotary actuator is connected to the black peice of plastic with the clear rod sticking through it...that was there so I could hold onto the motor when turning on the control loop when I needed to debug PID firmware...if there was a bug, it could damage the encoder on the motor).




    This is the spindle controller.  The torroid transformer provides the power spindle motor amplifier, which is down below the main board.  The main board gets it power form the little switcher on the left.  The big wide ribbon cable comes from a Micro-E processing board that converts the output of the Micro-E encoder into a 32 bit word.  The encoder had a resolution of about 1 micro degree, and the controller could control the position to about +/- 0.5 micro degrees, which is pretty increadible, actually.

    On the main board, on the right, is the master controller (a 68000), on the left of the board is the motion controller DSP (56002), and in the front left, is a Xilinx Gate array that was the spindle controller.

July 31, 2013

    For those who are interested, this is the document I made that has all of the schematics for everything I did in the system.  It includes the spindle controller board, gate array schematics, pld equations, DSP code, 68K code, and the windows program used to verify operation.

Spin Stand Documentation