Study On ECOS Knitting Machine Embedded Control System Design

Flat knitting machine is an important machinery and equipment for producting of knitted sweater, It can knit yarn which made of wool, linen, cotton, silk, and chemical fiber. As labor costs increased and consumer demand increased, the conventional handcrafted machine at this time has become inefficient, and the quality of the production is not well. Automatic computer flat knitting machine can organically integrate the modern computer control, mechanical design, electronic- technics and so on. Simultaneously, automatic computerized flat knitting machine realizes the automation in weaving production, and improves woven, tuck and other floral products effciently. It's only a time question that handcrafted machine will be replaced by automatic computerized flat knitting machine sooner or later.This paper is organized as following: Firstly, the development and technical characteristics of computerized flat knitting machine is introduced. Then, it described the machinery structure and knitting action theory about automatic computerized flat knitting machine. And on the base of the analysis of the priciples, we designed the hardware circuit of flat knitting machine in modular. In the implementation of software, a new kind of automatic computerized flat knitting machine is designed, which is based on modern popular proposed ECOS operating system on ARM and FPGA.With the theory of modular design, the control system is divided into four parts, which composed of man-machine interface module,file management module,weaving module and CAN bus communication module.In this paper, the system consists of hardware and software parts. The core control system of hardware is used by 32-bit ARM processor EDB9315, which integrated LCD controller, touching screen controller, UART interfaces, USB controller, and NAND FLASH Controller. Pattern file is stored on U disk through the USB interface passing into the large capacity of NAND FLASH. Resolvers resolve it and pass the control instructions to FPGA, and then the FPGA exectutes specific commands. The transmission speed and the capacity are improved more than the floppy.Weaving module control the actuators which lie on the head of flat knitting machine and the main server for the head, the shaker movement, the opening and closing for the roller by calling the FPGA and CAN module to achieve. With the control of LPC2294, the solenoids, elsectronic selectors, stepper mator, sinker act follow the request of knitting technics.Using FPGA as a coprocessor, used for system extending which include I/O extending, address coding, generating impulse for servo motto,stepper motor, instruction transmission and so on. This is used to reducing the burden on the main processor. The whole system used the modular development, and according to the functions, it is divided into each module which is more satisfied the requirements of software development, it can shorten the development time and made a clear code structure.