Touch Panel Computers for a Hydraulic Press Brake

Application: Machine Automation Location: China

Project Introduction: One of Advantech's customers in China is well known for researching and designing hydraulic press machinery. Since inception, they have successfully developed over 100 types of forge press machines, which are widely used in the aerospace, construction, metallurgical, automobile, and the power & energy industries, within China and beyond. This customer contacted Advantech when they wanted develop a new CNC hydraulic press brake, and needed help developing the system.

System Requirements:

Our customer was looking to develop a new type of CNC hydraulic press brake, which would be easier to use and greatly improve productivity. Furthermore, they had the following requirements:

• Rugged components were needed to guarantee safety and reliability.
• The machine needed to be equipped with a safety guard & emergency stop to ensure the safety of operators.
• The position of the back gauge must be adjustable through a touchscreen monitor.
• The CNC system must be able to auto calculate bending angles.
• Operators had to be able to edit machining programs in advance.
• The CNC system must also support an alarm function, to avoid overload and damage to the machines.
  

Project Implementation:

TPC-60S - ARM9 Touch Panel Computer with 5.7" QVGA STN LCD Display

System Diagram:

System Description:

The control commands of the touchscreen are sent to PLC through COM port. Then PLC will control the operation of each component. Real-time communication can be achieved because of the optimized low level communication. The encoder sends feedback signals to the CNC system, which will then detect the location of each control axis of the machine tool.

Conclusion:

The main unit of the touchscreen uses a WINCE OS which provides strong flexibility and efficiency for the control software developed on this platform. Various complicated functions and controls can now be operated on the screen, without any limitations from secondary configuration software. Meanwhile, low level communication software can be efficiently developed, and the overall system efficiency has been raised. Additionally, introducing a touchscreen solved many problems (such as complicated operations and incomplete training) in the CNC systems that previously needed to be operated via keyboard. Without extensive training or instructions, users can intuitively operate the touchscreen. Therefore, the requirements of high accuracy display and positioning control has been satisfied. The customer has also developed software with graphical display and emulation functions, which have been fully optimized for the HMI. This is owed a great deal to the expansion capacity of the TPC-60S.