2010 International Conference on Intelligent System Design and Engineering Application

Design and Implementation of CNC Machine Remote Monitoring and Controlling

System Based on Embedded Internet

Zhai Wen-zheng1,2 HU Yue-li1,2

1 School o f Mathemat ics & Information Engineering,
Taizhou University, Taizhou 300070, China;
2 School of Mechatronics Engineering and Automat ion,
Shanghai University, Shanghai 200072, China;
e-mail: zhwen zheng@shu.edu.cn
1. Key Laboratory of Advanced Display and System
Applications (Shanghai University), Ministry of Education;
2. School of Mechatronics Engineering and
Automation, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Po wer
Station Automation Technology, Shanghai University,
Shanghai 200072, China;
e-mail: huyueli@shu.edu.cn

Abstract—The network control of CNC machine is the
inexorable development trend of modern manufacturing
industry, and the combination of embedded technology with
network has become a research hot. This paper puts forward a
novel design idea of remote monitoring and controlling system
of CNC machine based on embedded Internet, presents its
architecture principle design and software-hardware
implementation procedure of the whole system. On the basis of
embedded ARM Cortex-M0 microprocessor LPC1114,
Ethernet controller ENC28J60, ported µC/OS -II and LwIP, an
embedded Ethernet communication module is constructed to
facilitate the communication between the upper industrial
control PC, the field monitoring host and the various CNC
machine Tools. After the hardware architecture design and
software programming are completed, the system is tested and
the results indicate that NC-RMCS functions have been
realized. Also, the network control technology is practical and
has higher application value.
Keywords-CNC machine network;remote monitoring and
controlling system;Embeded ethernet communication
modules;ARM Cortex-M;RTOS
I. INT RODUCTION
With the rapid development of the information
technology and the CNC technology, the network
management of the NC industry has become a necessity [1].
Some famous NC machine and system manufacturers in
overseas, such as Mazak and Oku ma in Japan, Siemens in
German, etc. have realized the network monitor, diagnose
and management with integrated network communication in
NC system. That reflected the tendency of NC machine tool
mu ltiform models, great difference and difficult networking
in NC system.
Based on embedded ARM Cortex-M 0 microprocessor
LPC1114 and Ethernet controller ENC28J60, an embedded
Ethernet communication module is constructed to facilitate
the communication between the upper industrial control PC,
the field monitoring host and the various CNC machine
Tools. After development an embedded software runtime
environment and NC application software modules of the
remote monitoring and controlling system of NC machine
tool (NC-RM CS), the data and status from field NC
machines can be accessed and monitored by Ethernet.
Furthermore, the system can perform remote monitoring and
controlling, load and download NC program, convey
productive task and manage machining task on the Internet.
The NC-RMCS is general and costs lower. It can be
applied on many traditional NC systems to realize remote
monitor and management. The experimental results indicate
that the network control technology is practical and has
higher application value.
II. A RCHITECT URE PRINCIPLE OF REMOTE MONITORING
AND CONT ROLLING OF NC MACHINE TOOLS
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to the network direction. At the present, most of NC Embedded Ethernet NC Unit No.1 Embedded Ethernet NC Unit No.n

machines at home use the traditional closed NC system, such 8SSHU,QGXVWU\

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as the FANUC, MITSUBISHI, Siemens, etc. That kind of
Ethernet
system, which transmits by common RS232, RS422 or Ethernet

Embeded Ethernet Embeded Ethernet

RS485, is unfavorable to extend the network. So it's Embeded Ethernet
Communication Module
Embeded Ethernet
Communication Module Communication Module Communication Module
indispensable to append network function communication
outside the NC system to put into effect network CNC Machine Tool CNC Machine Tool CNC Machine Tool CNC Machine Tool

management of NC machines.
In the paper, a novel architecture of general network
control applied to traditional NC system is proposed against Figure 1. The architecture principle diagram of the NC-RMCS based on
the physical circu mstances in our country of various brands, embedded Internet

978-0-7695-4212-6/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE 506

DOI 10.1109/ISDEA.2010.283
 The NC-RM CS is co mposed of embedded Ethernet
communication modules, field monitoring hosts, upper
industrial control PC, the application server, the database
server, the web browser computers, the remote monitoring
and controlling host. The architecture is shown in Fig.1.
The system adopts three-layer architecture based on B/S
mode. On the upper layer, the web browser computers based
on Internet handles human-machine interface (HMI) of the
system, such as NC system input and output interface,
remote monitor and control, remote fault diagnosis, network
communication and so on.
The second layer is application server, which is
responsible for executing of NC function modules and
applications of the system. The system can response users
request by starting relevant application, and then sends the
results to the client. It also can establish connection with
database server which is used to store NC programs,
machine tool information, operation log and feedback data
etc.
The bottom layer is intelligent device layer, which
consists of the embedded Ethernet communication module,
CNC machine tools, upper industrial control hosts and field
monitoring hosts. The field monitoring host can
simultaneously monitor all the CNC machine tools in one
Ethernet, including display the machine status information,
monitor the communication settings between the upper
industrial control PC and CNC mach ines, and transport
between machine tool commands and NC code and so on.
Moreover, it can be directly accessed application server and
local server by Internet so that conduct the remote fault
diagnosis about the status data of NC machine tools.
The characteristics of this system are simp le operation,
easy application, stable and reliable running. Remote
supervisory and diagnosis of working and operating status of
several NC machines is put into effect. Transmission
efficiency of NC program is improved. The management of
machin ing and processing of traditional NC machine is
improved and the actual productive efficiency is increased
effectively.
III. HARDWARE DESIGN
As one of the most important components of NC-RMCS,
the embedded Ethernet communication module co mpletes
the communication between the upper industrial control PC,
the field monitoring host and the various CNC machine
Tools. Fig.2 is the diagram of the module, which is consisted
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TPOUT
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FLASH
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Figure 2. Embeded Ethernet Communication Module
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by several parts: embedded ARM processor LPC1114,
SDRAM and FLASH to set up a basic system; ENC28J60
chip takes the charge of the communication with Ethernet;
the LCD and the keyboard circuit realize a man-machine
interaction.
A. ARM LPC1114
The ARM Cortex-M 0 is by now the smallest, lowest-
power, and most energy-efficient ARM processor available.
The exceptionally s mall silicon area, low-power and minimal
code footprint of the processor enables developers to achieve
32-bit performance at an 8-bit price point.
The LPC1114 is a ARM Cortex-M0 based, low-cost 32-
bit MCU, designed for 8/16-b it microcontroller applications,
offering performance, low power, simple instruction set and
memory addressing together with reduced code size
compared to existing 8/16-bit architectures.
The peripheral co mplement of the LPC1114 includes 32
KB of flash memory, 8KB of data memory, one RS-485
UART, up to two SPI interfaces with SSP features, four
general purpose counter/timers, a 10-bit A DC, and up to 42
general purpose I/O pins.
In the design, The RealView M icrocontroller
Development Kit (MDK) for ARM is used as Integrated
Development Environ ment (IDE) which provides developers
with a feature-rich environment optimized for A RM powered
microcontrollers and development board SACB1100 is u sed
as target board in the process of transplantation. Host
computer is connected to target board to establish a cross -
development environment for debugging through JTAG.
B. Ethernet Module
The ENC28J60 is a stand-alone Ethernet controller with
an industry standard Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI). It is
designed to serve as an Ethernet network interface for any
controller equipped with SPI. The ENC28J60 meets all of
the IEEE 802.3 specifications. It incorporates a number of
packet filtering schemes to limit incoming packets. It also
provides an internal DMA module for fast data throughput
and hardware assisted checksum calculation, which is used
in various network protocols. Co mmunication with the host
controller is imp lemented via an interrupt pin and the SPI,
with clock rates of up to 10 MHz. Two dedicated pins are
used for LED link and network activity indication. With the
ENC28J60, Connecting the embedded communication
module to Ethernet is achieved easily.
IV. SOFTWARE DESIGN
The software system architecture of the NC-RMCS is
shown in Fig.3. It co mprises two parts: the embedded
software runtime environment and NC application software
components. The embedded software runtime environment
contains an embedded real-time operating system (RTOS)
µC/ OS-II, an embedded TCP/IP stack LwIP, an embedded
file system and a number of drivers such as those for
Ethernet, keyboard, LCD display and UART interface. The
NC application software components are composed of a
number of tasks and functional modules, such as the NC
machine status monitoring module and operation control
module, which are either scheduled to execute by OS or C. Aplication
trigged by interrupts. The main program flow chart design is given in the
Figure 4. In view of the system functional modules: serial
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sending and receiving subtasks module, Ethernet sending
and receiving subtasks module, the system main design
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subtask lowest, and make the priority of Ethernet receiving
subtask highest. With embedded Ethernet communication
module, we could realize data conversion between the
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different data on different bus and the Ethernet to implement
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The design of application program is based on the idea of
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idea, we can also lighten programmer’s burden, reduce the
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Figure 3. The software system architecture of the NC-RMCS
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A. µC/OS-II Operation System

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scaleable, reliable and preemptive multi-task management

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transplanted into the ARM microcontroller LPC1114,

providing file system, network interface, memo ry )ODJ(WKHUQHW
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transplanting of µC/OS-II to embedded platform [3], they are
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embedded Ethernet communication module, and the usage of )LQLVKHG

services of µC/OS-II makes it easier to lin k those sub-
modules.
B. LwIP(Lightweight Internet Protocol)
Due to the limitation of hardware resource in the
embedded system and the low-efficiency of general purpose
TCP/IP protocol stacks and protocol models, LwIP is
required when accessing to Internet.
LwIP is a small independent imp lementation of the
TCP/IP suite, which focuses on reducing memory usage and
code size and makes it suitable for the embedded systems.
LwIP provides user an API that does not require any data
copying [5]. In addition, LwIP also provides a BSD socket
API. Real-t ime tasks can use any of those APIs to send and
receive packets through the network.
Figure 4. the main program flow chart
When the remote monitoring and controlling hosts send a
request to the local system via Internet, the corresponding
monitoring procedure begins to work and the status data
fro m CNC machine tools are sent back the remote host after
they have been processed.
When the embedded Ethernet communication module
receives alarm information fro m CNC mach ine tools, the
module sends the appropriate control commands to CNC
machine to ensure machine running normally.
After hardware p latform design and software
programming are completed, the ultimate generated code
which has been compiled is downloaded the target system -
the embedded Ethernet communication module. The code
includes hardware system startup code, µC/OS -II kernel,

508
LwIP protocol stack, SPI port drivers and part of the NC
application.
V. CONCLUSIONS
In the paper, the architecture of NC-RM CS based on
embedded Internet is proposed and the embedded Ethernet
communication module is developed to complete the
communication between the upper industrial control PC, the
field monitoring host and the various CNC Machine Tools.
the system can perform NC machine tool remote monitoring
and controlling.
Future work will concentrate on Qos features
improvement of the NC-RM CS. It will also include porting
µClinu x to the embedded Ethernet communication module.
A CKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is supported by IC Special Foundation of
Shanghai Municipal Co mmission of Science and Technology
(Grant No. 09706201300), Shanghai Municipal Co mmission
of Economic and Information (Grant No.090344), Shanghai
High-tech Industrialization of New Energy Vehicles (Grant
No.09625029) and Graduate Innovation Fund of Shanghai
University, Youth Foundation of Taizhou University (No.
09QN06).
509
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