Development of a Soft-Computer Numerical Control System for Micro-Electrochemical Machining

Problem statement: In this study a kind of soft Computer Numerical Control (soft-CNC) system for micro Electrochemical Machining (micro-ECM) based on RT-Linux platform is developed. Approach: Dual-kernel structure of System is adopted: Linux and RT-Linux are used to realize timesharing tasks and real-time tasks separately. Results: The CNC Graphical User Interface (GUI) is designed by Qt and runs on Linux core space. Based on the hard real-time facilities provided by RT-Linux, the real-time tasks, including the gap detection task, gap adjustment task, interpolating task and other real-time control tasks are implemented. The Shared Memory (SHM) and RT-FIFO were adopted to construct the communication between the GUI and real-time tasks. Conclusion: A few experiments of various micro structures micro electrochemical milling on stainless steel are introduced to validate the performance of the system. The process and the results implied that the soft-CNC System is Real-time, stable and reasonable.