Low‐cost, High‐Capability, Embedded Systems for CNC Education and Research

Teaching of CNC and CAD/CAM technologies has recently taken a great importance, due to their development, to the great number of solutions available on the market, and to the frequent updates. Nevertheless, one of the most urgent need is to improve the quality of education coping with a rapidly growing number of students. Nowadays, in comparison to the past, many Open-Source technical solutions, both hardware and software, are available to realise easily and cheaply some scaled-down prototypes of numerical control machine tools: these are able to work perfectly and can be employed as a learning method. This paper shows some past experiences regarding the development of some degree thesis works. In particular, it is shown how to implement a numerical control (LinuxCNC) in two specific cheap embedded systems (Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black). In this way, a student has the possibility of simulating the working of a complete Numerical Control and of learning interactively its way of programming. The final result and student response have shown an excellent effectiveness of these experiences and easy to use as powerful tool in engineering education.