Let’s chat: Tool Presetting

Serious trouble can often be avoided with open communication. Consider the Cuban missile crisis, when the Soviet Union decided Cuban cuisine might taste better than borscht and black bread. Adlai Stevenson II, as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, worked with the U.N. to talk some sense into those belligerent Russians. And if Paul Revere hadn’t told the colonists the British were coming, Americans might be driving on the wrong side of the road today.

Courtesy of DMG / Mori Seiki USA

Using Mori-WebMonitor, users can log in to access machine information remotely from any Internet-connected device and see an up-to-date status of their machine operations. The system uses an MTConnect adapter.

While war may not be ready to break out on your shop floor, that doesn’t mean there aren’t communication problems. Part manufacturing can often be like watching football on a foggy day: You don’t know who fumbled the ball on the 5-yard line until the quarter’s over.

MTConnect, which is an open, royalty-free standard intended to foster greater interoperability between manufacturing devices and software applications, attempts to lift that fog and clear the air.

Dave Edstrom, president and chairman of the board at the MTConnect Institute, McLean, Va., said, “Our vision is to provide an easy way for people to get information out of their equipment at a greatly reduced cost.”

Another Pretty Face?

At a 2006 meeting of AMT—The Association For Manufacturing Technology, Edstrom made a bold statement: The industry was 21 years behind the curve in terms of communication. “Everyone was talking smart machines this and smart machines that. So I told them, ‘Why don’t you guys just get the damn things [manufacturing equipment] to speak the same language!’ There was no reason to reinvent the wheel.”

Edstrom explained that many new machine tools already had Ethernet on board or available as an option. HTTP and XML were well-established protocols by that time on the Web. Working with Dr. David Patterson of University of California-Berkeley, they convinced AMT that these communication standards had already worked for the computer industry for more than 2 decades—why not apply them to machine tools as well? Apparently, their speeches were convincing because AMT provided $1 million to develop MTConnect.

Oh, great, you’re thinking, one more CNC interface to contend with, along with more programming, more complexity and more variables, while all you want to do is ship parts. Not so fast. Edstrom said: “MTConnect is not an interface, nor is it a programming language. It is a simple, royalty-free, open-source standard built upon proven protocols. Similar to browsing on the Internet, MTConnect lets you type in the name of a machine tool and receive back simple verbs, such as probe, current, sample and asset. You say ‘send me data on what you’re doing,’ and the control returns that data to a database, spreadsheet or software program.”

But hold on: Industrial control giant FANUC offers its Focas 2 interface, which understands more dialects than the linguistics department at MIT. Siemens has Profinet, Mitsubishi has EZ-Socket, and Mazak has Fusion. All of them are feature-rich and cost less than a weekend with the kids at a theme park. Do we really need another way to listen to our machine tools?

Courtesy of Arnold Engineering, Corona, Calif.

Machine shops produce a vast amount of data, and not all of it comes from CNC machine tools. Devices such as tool presetters, inspection equipment (such as the pictured device) and CAD/CAM systems are contribuing data, with MTConnect enabling users to pull data from them via Bluetooth connections.

“Yes,” Edstrom said. Traditionally, machine tool controls and auxiliary manufacturing equipment have been like high school students waiting at the bus stop: They only talk to their friends. This might explain why so few shops collect data from their machine tools.

“Only about 2 percent of all shops monitor their shop floor,” Edstrom explained. “I don’t mean a stack light or a spreadsheet or somebody walking around with a clipboard. I mean honest-to-God access to a machine tool anytime, anywhere. The machine was given a command to go to some X, Y, Z position. Well, how close did it get to going there? How much time did it spend? You can’t manage what you aren’t measuring.”

Even if you don’t agree that there is a need for MTConnect, you have to admit he has a point. CNC equipment isn’t getting any cheaper, good mach-inists are few and far between, and competitive pressure is increasing. Manufacturers need every edge they can get, yet the number of shops monitoring their CNC equipment is negligible. Why do so few companies choose to ignore the wealth of data available from their machine tools?

One Big Bandwagon

Apparently, Edstrom is not alone. Machine tool builders and control manufacturers alike have been pushing for many years toward open machine communication. Unfortunately for MTConnect, however, not everyone is singing out of the same hymnal. Siemens Industry Inc., Elk Grove, Ill., a supplier of CNC, motor, drive and communication technology to machine tool builders, promotes an open-platform strategy for its controls. Roger Hart, manager of R&D in the U.S., said, “Siemens supports connectivity to its Sinumerik controls through open-architecture tools available to machine tool builders and third-party integrators for manufacturing data communications protocols, including MTConnect.”

Despite this vote of confidence, Edstrom pointed out that Siemens is not part of the MTConnect community. “Manufacturers around the globe would love to see them become an active member of the MTConnect Institute.”

Nor is Haas Automation Inc. listed as a member of MTConnect. Kurt Zierhut, vice president of electrical engineering for Haas, said the Oxnard, Calif.-based company is only being pragmatic. “We have fewer than 50 customers a year asking about MTConnect. In spite of this, we are committed to providing an MTConnect-compliant interface, even though there is not yet a firm schedule for the development work necessary to achieve this.”

This doesn’t mean Haas is not interested in MTConnect, just that it has bigger fish to fry. Its M-Net interface, released several years ago, provides for a network connection to monitor machine tools. Even so, Zierhut said less than 1 percent of Haas customers use M-Net.

Courtesy of Siemens Industry

The ePS network services package from Siemens enable a machine builder, end user and Siemens to communicate in real time for predictive maintenance and machine-to-machine data comparisons.

And while FANUC FA America, Hoffman Estates, Ill., does offer an MTConnect interface, recent press releases suggest its support for the open-source standard is lukewarm. For example, it just introduced FASOPC for “easy retrieval of CNC machine production data” based on the OPC standard (Object Linking and Embedding for Process Control), established in 1996 by an industry task group with the same goal as MTConnect.

Edstrom is unconcerned. “We actually have a memorandum of understanding with the OPC Foundation and view them as partners,” he said. “We’ve developed a joint specification called MTConnect-OPC UA (united architecture), and there’s a white paper that talks about how we can work together.”

While support for MTConnect is not universal, it has a substantial following. Earlier this year, Mazak Corp. offered a Webinar titled “MTConnect: Downstream Applications to Increase Productivity and Competitiveness.” The Okuma America Corp. Web site lists MTConnect alongside the THINC-OSP control as part of the company’s technology lineup.

And DMG / Mori Seiki USA Inc. recently announced its intent to offer an MTConnect V1.1-compliant adapter as standard on its MAPPS operating system. The company stated, “With preinstalled MTConnect adapters, DMG / Mori Seiki customers will have a plug-and-play solution that allows easy, real-time monitoring of their machines—from anywhere, at any time.”

Courtesy of Siemens Industry

Through a secure Internet connection, Siemens ePS network services connect shop floor equipment to remote maintenance and repair facilities.

Surya Kommareddy, manager of software and technical sales for DMG / Mori Seiki, Hoffman Estates, Ill., indicated that traditional proprietary communication solutions are going the way of tin cans and string. “With MTConnect being an open standard, it allows customers to monitor all of their machine tools irrespective of the vendor. That’s very appealing for them, and it’s also good for us, because it allows for greater flexibility when integrating other equipment.” Kommareddy quipped, “We wish everyone had a ‘Mori Seiki only’ shop. Until they do, we need an open standard.”