Design And Research Of Rapid Prototyping Control System Based On Mask Curing Method

The booming development of rapid prototyping(also known as 3D printing) technology has caused great changes in traditional manufacturing industry which has become the hotspot of many scholars and enterprises. Mask curing method is one of the many rapid prototyping methods, which adopts photosensitive resin as the molding material. Due to the characteristics of high precision, good surface quality, fast forming speed and high material utilization rate, mask curing method shows a strong advantage in quick product functional verification, accelerating development cycles and other aspects. As the core of rapid prototyping equipments, control system involves mechanical components motion control, sensor data acquisition, data communication and other functions, which plays the key role in the costs of rapid prototyping equipments. A low-cost, portable solution of rapid prototyping control system MRPCS based on mask curing method is proposed. The main research work is as follows:(1) Using K60 which is based on Cortex-M4 launched by Freescale as the control chip, based on the principle of mask curing method, the overall design of MRPCS is proposed. Analysis of the mechanical structure design is also given. The photosensitive resin’s characteristic parameters of penetration depth and exposure threshold are tested and analyzed by experiments.(2) Based on the idea of hardware components and software components hierarchy model, under the full consideration of system performance, scalability, interference immunity and so on, the design and implementation of the software and hardware platform in MRPCS are elaborated and the test methods and results of hardware circuit and software components are given.(3) Aiming at ARM Cortex-M4 processor architecture and its own hardware platform, implementing the porting of MQX with the optimization and cutting in PSP and BSP, preemptive scheduling strategy based on priority and the optimization of interrupt handling mechanism make MRPCS with high timeliness and fast interrupt response;(4) With the main principles of device independence, the application software is divided into several independent tasks like stepper motor task, SD card task and so on. Also the communication mechanism based on event and message queue is proposed according to the principles of data independence and cycle independence to implement the synchronization and communication between tasks.This paper also gives the resolvents for the issues of hardware selection, compatibility of I8080 in LCD controller and the unity of components under non-operating system and operating system. Preliminary molding experimental results show that the system which is low cost, stable, high-precision in molding, implements the preliminary molding function while reducing the complexity of secondary development effectively, laying a strong foundation for the commercialization of MRPCS.