ELIMINATION OF PROPRIETARY CONTROL FOR COMPUTERIZED NUMERICAL CONTROL (CNC) MACHINE

This report presents a method for eliminating the proprietary control for computerized numerical control (CNC) machine with aid of a controller which will take G and M codes generated by computer-aided design/ computer aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) software for a two dimensional drawing file (.prt or .dxf) as input. The drawing file is obtained by converting a JPEG image into .prt or .dxf file with the aid of Img2CAD software. This drawing file is imported in UG Nx CAD/CAM software (Version 5) and scaled to the required dimensions. 2D manufacturing of the drawing is carried out in UG Nx and G and M codes for the same is obtained by carrying out post-processing operation. G and M code program is saved in a text file with extension .nc. This file is taken as an input by Universal Gcode Sender software which is connected to Grbl shield V5 and Arduino Uno hardware via serial port of laptop. Before executing G code program, the output can be visualized using G-Code visualizer option.