Development of Opengl Based 3D Simulator for Computer Numerical Control

PC-based open architecture control systems (OAC) become the major trend in CNC control system development. This paper focuses on the development of a complete 3D simulator for an OAC system to verify a G-code file before sending it to a CNC machine to avoid risks of damaging expensive work pieces, breaking tools and fixtures or even crashing a CNC machine because of some programming error, it also can display the tool path in real-time mode when machining to make the user have better experience. In order to achieve the best performance, OpenGL application programming interface (API) for rendering and 3D visualization of tool path was adopted. Regular expression is used for faster G-code parsing. The programming platform is Visual Studio 2008.