Research of communication mechanism in CNC system based on EtherCAT

EtherCAT (Ethernet for Control Automation Technology) is a type of real-time industrial Ethernet protocol for date communication in automation control system, which is used in the pure-soft open CNC system communication. In this solution named ADX CNC, CNC system is the master station and communicates data through the NIC of Industrial PC with slave stations without any other cards. To assure the real-time data communication, RTX (Real-Time Extension) is used as the environment, in which the EtherCAT function is embedded through developing special NIC driver. In addition, slave station device description file and EtherCAT date frame filter were developed to fulfill the communication. It proves that ADX CNC has excellent perform and good developed prospects based on the application in the actual three axises machining center.