A Versatile Application Programming Interface for Numerical Control Systems

Most of motion control cards are built based on parallel bus and served as kernel control units of numerical control systems. Since there is no industrial standard of instruction systems for different motion control cards, each manufacture insists their own instruction sets with no compatibility with those of others. This poor compatibility becomes an obstacle for customers to build their high performance target motion control systems with the selection among different motion control cards. And this is especially true when customers found that their current motion control cards are not suitable for their new products and would like to try different ones, for they must spend plenty of time to master the new instruction system corresponding to the new motion control card they may select. This poor compatibility will lead to much more system development cycle and cost. In this paper, we present an Application Programming Interface (API) which could be used for improving the compatibility of motion control cards as mentioned above. And with the application programming interface, customers may simply select and invoke the motion control function library related to different motion control cards with least change from the former configurations for building the new target motion control systems at low cost and relative short period of time.