Livestream Discussing LinuxCNC and MTConnect 27 July 2026 11:00am GMT+10

Just putting this out there as advance notice. 27 July 11:00am Brisbane, Australia time GMT+10:00

I was approached by Freecad Developer Brad Collette to discuss work he's done to bring MTconnect and LinuxCNC. He and I are going to do a Podcast style discussion on this topic.
youtube.com/live/b_S-p2nylr8

I've never done anything like this and if nothing else it should be worth a laugh seeing if I can put it together with me in Australia and Brad in the USA!

MTconnect is a standards based system used by all of the major CNC machine manufacturers that publishes read only machine parameters. I was blown away how MTconnect saved an automotive factory from incurring downtime costing $1.8m just because the data showed a motor on a CNC machine was failing..... So I for one is keen to hear what Brad has to say... 

Hey Rod,
Beyond the YT link, where can I find a bit more info on MTconnect? Not sure if what I'm finding in google is the best resource.

I found the info I was looking for. Given how general a controller LinuxCNC is, it looks like every class of machine (router, mill, lathe, arm, etc) would need its own MTConnect Adapter type but you could probably generalize the agent.

Cheers

Yes, it will be interesting to see Brad's working proof of concept in the podcast. I have a feeling the python interface provides the basis of a generic adapter so your concerns about the class of machine is probably not relevant.

I did find a 6 video tutorial series on MTconnect which I watched

At the risk of dating myself, MTConnect reminds me of an old project (ganglia) which was originally used in academic high-performance computing environments to monitor distributed compute nodes. These ideas led to the modern data-center and eventually bormon/prometheus for large-scale infrastructure monitoring. It's a similar problem. Lots of vendors with proprietary hardware all reporting data. Aggregating it is a PIA.

Yeh, come along and we'll find out together. Dated ot not, adoption by Mazac, Siemens, Fanuc et al does give a platform for industry. BUt collection of data for statistical evaluation is saving some plants a lot of money by preventing unscheduled failures when for example an increase in motor torque is reported. In one case downtime was $1.7m per hour if the plant had a shut down.  

He's done a really great job with his MTconnect;
it works perfectly, so I integrated it directly into my riocore system as a plugin.
It would be nice if there were a dedicated repository for it.

Yes its pretty cool. His repo is here  github.com/sliptonic/linuxcnc/tree/feature/mtconnect-agent
I've added this link to the video description (and installed it on my machine including a Home Assistant panel)
I have asked in another thread if anybody has a 3 axis vismach model we could use in our PR to linuxCNC

The next step is to discuss with the devs how best to package this. My thought is to have a userspace driver that you added to your Hal file something like: Because all parameters are contained in the ini file, I think this approach will require passing the ini file name to the driver.
 

I've already found the repo, but it would be better if it were separate from the LinuxCNC source—that's what I meant by having its own repo.

It would also be cool if you could pass in additional HAL signals, like sensors or 'door-open' inputs.

EDIT:

My first AI project (A simple status page for MTConnect): 
github.com/multigcs/riocore/blob/dev/rio...nect/files/stat.html

to test it, you can simply overwrite the twin.html file with it.

 

Thats pretty cool. I'll give it a go. If you have Home Assistant it was dead simple to publish this
 

In fact it was stupid simple once I enabled mqtt which I already had on my server (A pi4b Ive been running for years), it was done for me.

 

meister wrote:

He's done a really great job with his MTconnect;
it works perfectly, so I integrated it directly into my riocore system as a plugin.
It would be nice if there were a dedicated repository for it.

There is a PR submitted now into LinuxCNC's core. It would be great if you could add your feedback there  github.com/LinuxCNC/linuxcnc/pull/4318