Hello guys,
a friend and i have planned a retrofit of an old industrial CNC Mill - a MAHO MH400E - since many years, after scoring it back in 2020 and driving it through Bavaria while the very first Corona wave hit the whole world.
The first intention was to retrofit the machine with Mesa hardware and LinuxCNC. After destroying two Mesa boards in another machine build, we decided to use propper industrial components. Therefore the desire to use EtherCAT with reliable Beckhoff hardware arose. After gathering all the necessary components over the years, it was finally time to implement drivers and everything in order to install the accumalted hardware into the Maho CNC mill. The whole process can also be found in my
bachelors thesis and is publicly available on GitHub
.
The thesis is intentionally written in a way, that beginners have all necessary EtherCAT commands, instructions on how to build the repos from source and CiA402 related information centralized in one place.
The retrofit is not finished at the moment and the process of implementing every component into the CNC mill will be shared here. We aim to execute this retrofit to the highest possible standard, drawing on our professional backgrounds in electronics and mechanics.
Starting from 05/2026, the hardware is mounted inside the control cabinet - which is subject to change, all spindle motor speed controll with contactors will be removed and all the 400V components will be replaced with newer Siemens safety hardware and contactors. The machine is able to read the axes position with an accuracy of 2µm (1µm was planned). The root cause of this problem is subject of the future posts. I'll keep you posted.
All machine files can be found in
this GitHub Repo (Maho400E-LinuxCNC)
, the custom interpolator PCB is also
avaliable on GitHub (SinCosEnc-Conv_EP5101)
, the custom EtherCAT drivers can be found in the seperate
"linuxcnc-ethercat" repo
and in the long shot, the Siemens Machine Keyboard (
Siemens-LinuxCNC-Interface
) is also planned for implementation as a seperate EtherCAT device.
If you have any questions, just join the conversation
Best Regards
Patrick
