Abstract
This paper describes the design and implementation of a PC(personal computer) based open architecture machine tool controller. The hardware of open architecture CNC has generally a motion control board on a PC for controlling a servo motor. But this paper describes open architecture hardware that consists of a PC, a counter board a DAC board and a DIO board only. This makes it easy to generate CNC software module in a hardware-independent way. The proposed open architecture CNC software runs on the MS-Windows NT. The paper describes a method of con-trolling servo motors using a real-time timer of MS-Windows NT and a commercial real-time operating system on the MS-Windows. NT. An open and reconfigurable software module is made up of an object and an API(application programming interface). Using the object and the API a new CNC system can be quickly configured to control dif-ferent machine tools. The proposed open architecture CNC system is applied to 4-axis lettering center.