Computerized Flat Knitting Machine Controller Design

Computerized flat knitter is an important machine in the field of weaving. The core part of the machine is the control system, which generates instructions following the requests of weaving and the synchronized signals from the machine to make it work automatically.Based on the analysis of construction and function of the system, the project proposes a design of an embedded control system on ARM and CPLD for the flat knitter.The hardware platform of this scheme includes core application system circuit, implement circuit of process, circuit involving keyboard and display device. S3C44B0x processor based on ARM7 core of Samsung is applied as CPU. For the problem of more than 200 connections from I/O to main processor, we apply two CPLD chips as the expansion to form the implement circuit of process, which play as the peripheral device for the main processor.Software platform includes Boot Loader, device driver, weaving modular, man-machine interface and control application. Primarily, uc/OSⅡ is applied and then transferred to ucLinux platform. Boot Loader can support System-Boot, program download to RAM and execution, burning to flash memory and so on. Device driver program isolates applications and hardware circuit of peripheral process implementation.Compared to control system based on MCU or IPC, it processes the properties of overall and high-performance control ability, friendly graphic interface, flexible mass-data memory-interface as well as the perfect support of network.