Arm Master Chip-based Micro-thermal Print Driver And System Design

With the rapid development of economy and information communication technology, the printers, as the convenient output equipments, have been applied to the commodity circulation, traffic transportation, industrial control, and many other fields. However, the traditional printers can not meet the requirements both in performance and functions from new applications.The thermal printer, as a new type of product, is very attractive to the customers with its advantages such as fast speed, high quality, low noise, easy miniaturization, convenient maintenance, simple operation, and fine cost-effectiveness, so it has been widely applied in the developed countries as United States and Japan. Meanwhile, with the development of microelectronic technology, the embedded chips, for its high performance and low price, have gradually become the preferred control chips in the smart instruments. Subjecting to the new market demand and combining the thermal printing and control technology, a new design of thermal mini-printing driver and its system was studied in this dissertation based on the ARM7TDMI kernel chip S3C44B0X.The control principle of the thermal printing system and the advantages and disadvantages of the current designs were analyzed and compared, upon which the design scheme of this study was proposed, including hardware, software, and testing of the thermal printing system as described in this dissertation.Based on the deep discussion of the features of thermal head and control chip, the hardware system of printing driver was determined with the aim to simplify the whole system, to improve its integration and reliability, and easy to develop the software. The driver hardware was made up of several modules, including interface circuit, state detection module, step-motor driving module, accident protection module, and power supply module. For the software system, according to the development principle of embedded system software and the characteristics of thermal printers, the modularization design technique was employed for each module to improve the work efficiency and system reliability, and the whole software was divided into such modules as data receiving, character processing, data transmitting, print heating, motor driving, and accident protecting. Under the general configuration and with the combination of the hardware and software functions, the driver and the system of the minitype thermal printer was designed based on the control chip of ARM. It is indicated, from the testing of the individual modules and the whole performance of the designed system, that the thermal mini-printer was equipped with the functions to print the Chinese characters of the first and second class group, ASCII codes, and user-defined figures, and with the printing speeds of 6mm/s, 12.5mm/s, and 25mm/s, which could be applicable to different situations.