CNC Feed Drive Control

This document serves as the Final Design Report (FDR) for a senior project developed by our team: four senior Mechanical Engineering students and one computer engineering student at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly). While the project was completed for, and sponsored by, Professor Simon Xing of Cal Poly, the remainder of the university’s controls professors will be indirectly benefited from this project. Our goal was to design and implement a functional CNC Feed Drive to be used for educational demonstrations and data collection. This document discusses our early product research and benchmark goals, which established constraints for our product design, as well as identifies our design process and conclusions. Through this evaluation of the feed drive form and function, we determined optimal system components - including a DC motor with rotary encoders, a ballscrew, linear bearings, and a load table with screws for fixturing. This FDR also discusses our design progression, beginning with the structural prototype and followed by a description of the final design. This will include the manufacturing steps taken, the front-end and back-end code generated and used to control the system, and the associated user’s manual. Lastly, this report will discuss the test procedures that we derived from the design verification requirements and include an overview of our test results. We conclude with our final acknowledgments, and we wanted to mention that we are extremely grateful to have worked on this project. The team has learned so much throughout the year, and we look forward to handing the prototype over to Professor Xing