Cincinnati 850 and older Fanuc Interfaces

Greetings to the forum!

Some users might be interested in our projects to interface legacy machine I/O to LinuxCNC using ModbusTCP (ethernet). So far ModbusTCP seems like a great way to get legacy I/O into LinuxCNC without a ton of expensive and time consuming rewiring.

First up was interfacing the legacy Cincinnati Acramatic 850 I/O rack (MIA). Our M2MT card plugs in place of the IBA card and has been tested with the DC and AC input and output modules which are most common on Cincinnati machines.



In layout now is a Fanuc 6 interface called F62MT, which replaces the Fanuc "connection unit" A20B-0008-0540. This should greatly simplify upgrading Fanuc 6 machines.



We are interested in talking with Fanuc 0, Yasnac, and Okuma users about similar interfaces, as we only have Fanuc 6, Fanuc 15, and Acramatic 850 machines in-house for development.

Please visit RetrofitTools.com for more information on these projects.

Welcome. Its great to see another hardware manufacturer supporting LinuxCNC. I often see old Okuma lathes here in Australia going pretty cheap and have often wondered if they would be a viable retrofit product. With your help maybe they could be! But it would be awhile before I'd be ready to tackle one!

Hi Rod
There is a nice Okuma front panel here we've evaluated for interfacing. And we have limited access to several machines a few hours away, but they are used in daily production so not easy to tinker with. That's about as far as Okuma projects have gotten! There has been talk of putting LinuxCNC on those production machines, so things could heat up at any time.

For machines like Yasnac, Okuma, Mitsu, and Fanuc models that we don't have, it comes down to finding users who are interested in helping us (1) understand the most useful devices for their flavor of machine, and (2) get full documentation to do a design.

For example, we've started preliminaries on Yasnac i80 interfacing, but we'd really like to know a bit more demographics of what Yasnac models are in use and/or pending retrofit--is the i80 the one to do first? And we really need beta testers for these "foreign" machines, as we won't be able to add them all to our arsenal.

You've inspired me to put a survey about this on our website... and we very much welcome feedback from anyone about what machines they would like to retrofit and what projects would help them do it.

Tommy
Thanks! We are excited about progress so far and hope we can serve a niche market with a variety of useful items. We are also serving ourselves, too, as we have aging machines to keep going on a budget, and wish to make upgrades and retrofits as easy as possible.

Definitely want to learn more about the Mitsu controls, as we have never been inside one! If you can provide info on common models, best candidates for retrofits, board models, etc., that would be very useful.

Thanks!

Hi Tommy and Rod. Haven't figured a way to message you here about this. Perhaps you'd like to complete our new Controls Survey so we have your interests on record?

Thanks!
Retrofit Tools gang