Design and Implementation of a DSP based Inkjet Printer Motion Control System for Dynamic Print Mode Control

Current InkJet printing systems are based on a RISC+ASIC architecture for image processing and printer control. Time critical control function such as print masking is implemented on an ASIC and computationally intensive tasks such as image processing and motion control are executed on a RISC processor. This paper considers the development of a DSP based media handling and cartridge motion control system for an inkjet printer, in which a single high performance DSP is desired to execute the printer control as well as image processing tasks and print with the novel inkjet printing approach of Dynamic Print Mode Control (DPMC). A motion control architecture is implemented to maximize the use of DSP processing power and system memory while taking into account the latencies of motion controllers in printing a swath. The architecture utilizes various real-time services of DSP/BIOS to effectively manage DSP and printer engine while increasing printer throughput and it can be easily extended to include image processing activities on the DSP. Experimental results show the efficacy of the proposed motion control architecture and the control scheme for cartridge motion control.