30-Axis Hydraulic Motion Control System

Theta Engineering supervised the circuit design and performed the firmware development of this motion control system for MediaMation.  Each board controls 3 axes and each card cage holds 10 boards.  A full PID control algorithm was implemented on a Texas Instruments MSP430 microcontroller with support for integrator anti-wind up, settable max drive limits for safety, and dead-band compensation to support hydraulic proportional valve-based motion systems.  The MSP430 executes the full PID algorithm for 3 axes in roughly 360µS, making a 2KHz update rate readily feasible, even though this is  an order of magnitude greater than actually needed for hydraulic systems!