Stepper Motor Circuit Details
We decided to use a stepper motor to allow the movement of the camera since we wanted the movement to occur in “steps” instead of continuously (as in DC motors).
We decided to use an 8051 microprocessor to control the stepper motor due to the cheap cost of the processor and ease of use (possible to program it in C using the Keil compiler). It is always possible to design a custom circuit to accomplish any given task, but this makes the task quite difficult and time consuming (even expensive in this case).
Furthermore, it would have been possible to control the stepper motor directly, however we used an ASIC to control the clockwise and counter-clockwise motion of the stepper motor (the MC3479P chip). This is because it is much easier to control the IC than the motor itself, and furthermore a hardware solution is generally much faster than a software implementation. You are already familiar with the details of controlling a stepper motor using this chip from your stepper motor lab.
Similarly, you are familiar with the exact methods used to perform serial communication using the 8051 from your lab exercise on this subject (utilizing the LT1130CN chip to perform a conversion from RS232 to TTL voltage levels).