Software And Hardware Design And Implement Of The Driver Of The Thermal Lithographic Module In High-speed Card Producing Equipment

With the arrival of the information age and the rapid development of economic, smartcard plays a more and more important role in people’s life. We can observe that there areimage and text messages printed on each card. These messages are important identificationand distinguishing marks. It’s critical to ensure the quality of printing in the process of smartcard production.Among various kinds of printing technology, thermal printing is favored by many smartcard equipment manufacturers because of its advantages such as high printing quality, highprinting speed and suitable for a variety of print media. The print head is the core componentof the thermal printer. Due to the technology constraints, the print heads we use are almostimported from other countries. The price will be very expensive and it will be not easy tomaintain if we use the imported control board and system at the same time. In order to savecosts and meet the needs of the industrialization, smart card equipment manufacturers arecommitted to develop a high-speed and precise printing module. It’s also the module we studyin this paper.Thermal printer is a sub-module of the high-speed card producing equipment. Weprovide a solution for synchronous printing information on the card in high-speed cardproducing equipment. According to the characteristics of the print head and the actualproduction requirements, we use embedded ARM board in combination with real-timeoperating system Windows CE as a platform to develop a hardware and software controlsystem for the printing. The hardware design of the system includes the stepper-motor drivingcircuit, the print head driving circuit, photoelectric detector interface circuit and color sensorinterface circuit. According to the feature of multi task management of the real-time operatingsystem, we divide the whole control system into various modules in the software design. Theuse of the modularization technique makes it easier to maintain, expand, and realize morecomplex functions. The control board we use is based on the ARM11processor S3C6410which is made by SUNSANG. The processing speed is faster and the operability is strongerthan the traditional single chip. In terms of time, the system makes full use of the print headheating time interval to transmit data to the print head which helps saving the data transmission time. Meanwhile we adjust the heating time dynamically according to thecurrent temperature of the print head before printing without having to wait for the print headto cool down completely. It not only improves the printing speed but also ensures the goodprinting effect. The test result shows that the control system meet the needs of the industrialproduction and can run steadily in the high-speed card producing equipment.