Development of an Open-Source CNC-Based Controller for Automatic Workpiece Changer Considering Heterogeneous CNC Interfaces

This paper presents the development of an open-source, CNC-based control system for efficiently managing an Automatic Workpiece Changer (AWC). To overcome the limitations of flexibility and scalability in conventional commercial CNC systems, LinuxCNC was adopted as the open-source CNC platform. An EtherCAT-based communication system was designed to enable real-time data exchange between the controller and hardware. Additionally, a Python-based integration approach was implemented to facilitate seamless data exchange with machining CNC systems. A user-customized GUI was developed using Qt Designer for effective control and monitoring. The performance of the developed system was validated through experiments conducted on AWC hardware components.