The role of microprocessor in CNC machining

If the CNC system does not require processing result reproduction and error diagnosis, the PC is often idle during processing, which is a waste of computing resources, while the microprocessor has to perform a large number of complex operations, and measures can be taken at this time. Let the PC take on some calculation work, reduce the burden on the microprocessor and improve the processing efficiency. When surface machining is usually performed, the surface is decomposed into curves, and the tool processes each curve to complete the machining of the entire surface.

There are many ways to decompose a surface into a curve, such as the cutting method, the contour method, and the fixed parameter method.

Taking a NURBS surface as an example, when a parameter is fixed as a constant, the surface expression becomes a NURBS curve expression. To process the curve, first ask for information such as the control point and weight factor of the curve, and also determine the step size and line spacing of the processing. Then, when processing a curve, the control points, weight factors, processing steps, and line spacing of the next curve to be processed can be completed by the PC.

When the processing of the curve being processed is completed, the parameters of the next curve to be processed have been calculated by the PC, and can be used directly, and no need to be calculated in the interpolation algorithm, thereby improving the processing speed and realizing parallel operation.

The ARM+DSP architecture increases the difficulty of software development running on this. In this system, the WinCE6.0 operating system runs on the ARM, and the interpolation operation program runs on the DSP, and the data communication is performed by sharing the storage area between the two.