An EDM-CNC system based on the open system architecture

An open system architecture CNC system for Electrical Discharge Machining is proposed on the basis of Pentium PC and Windows operating system in this paper. A reference model (EDM-OAC) describes a hierarchical structure with which the system is able to maintain the modularity and hardware independence. The hardware system consists of a master PC and several interface cards and an embedded microcontroller, which is dedicated for machining process monitoring and control. The software system utilizes sophisticated features of Windows operating system such as multitask, DDE and DLL techniques as well as plenty resources to provide a high performance and user friendly interface. A fully featured EDM-CNC system combined with machining parameter optimization and machining process monitoring and fuzzy control has been implemented.