Design And Development Of A USB-based CNC System For Engravers

With the widely application of PC in industrial control, PC-based open architecture CNC systems are becoming popular. Engraving machines, as typical NC products, have been widely used in the field of manufacturing, advertisement, mould and adornment.According to the trend of CNC engraving technology, and the analysis of characteristic and communication interface of PC-based CNC engraving machines, an open architecture"software"-CNC system framework is proposed in the thesis, which is based on "PC + USB2.0 + numetic pulse servo interface board". The software and hardware of the prototype system are also designed, developed and tested.All the management and control functions of the"software"-CNC system are implemented with PC, including the management and compiling of the NC Code, interpolator, graphics simulation with OpenGL, man-machine-interface and so on. To simplify the interface and improve its communication ability between PC and the controlled machine, USB2.0 is used for the data transmission between PC and the machine control interface board by using EZ-USB FX2LP. The machine control interface board, named numetic pulse servo interface board, is designed with FPGA. In the board, the USB communication control is implemented with FPGA including EZ-USB data R/W control and FIFO data buffer, and all the interfaces for machine control, such as a fine interpolator and I/O interface, are also implemented. The system has the characteristics of brief structure, convenient connection, high hardware integrity and reliability.As the result, the developed CNC system prototype can work well with anticipated functions and performance.