Stepper motor performance under real-time multitasking environment

To get the maximum performance of stepper motor, different types of improvement and work has been done [1,6,2,5,8,9,10]. In this work, open loop control of stepper motor is considered under general purpose (Windows), Soft (Linux) and hard (RT-Linux) real-time operating systems. We have used the same controller program to operate the stepper motor in different operating system under multitasking environment. The Data AcQuisition (DAQ, PCL-812PG) card is used as a hardware interface and a GUI interface controller for IPC (Inter Process Communication) is also developed using RT Linux gcc compiler to make it user friendly. The main objective of this work is to show that the real-time error (jitter) is minimum incase of RT-Linux (Hard RTOS) over other soft real-time operating systems and thus observe the stability of the stepper motor.