Low-Cost Production CNC System

The paper discusses the development of a low cost CNC system capable of 6 axis simultaneous interpolated operation. The lower cost is achieved by incorporating all the features of a standard PC or micro-controller based CNC system in an Arduino based embedded system. The system also features an offline G-Code parser wherein the G-code is first converted to the NIST-SAl canonical code (NCC) [8] [6] and then interpreted on the micro-controller from a USB stick. Novel procedures are employed in the system to reduce the computational overheads in controlling a 6-axis CNC machine, while avoiding any loss in overall system performance. The whole project is launched as an open source project under GNU GPL v3.0. The source code and hardware reference design will be available on Google Code.