Base

Bornier

Open source EtherCAT slaves for machine tools running LinuxCNC: hardware, firmware and tooling.

• Website: bornier.dev

Status: design phase. Nothing here is usable yet. The base board schematic is complete and checked; PCB layout comes next. The firmware is a build scaffold running on a NUCLEO-H563ZI development board, without the EtherCAT stack yet.

Goals

• A family of standard-compliant EtherCAT slaves for CNC retrofits: motion (step/dir, encoders, probe), digital and analog I/O, spindle control, Modbus gateway.
• Works with any EtherCAT master; developed and tested against LinuxCNC with the IgH master (lcec).
• Firmware builds on the LinuxCNC PC itself with a free toolchain (arm-none-eabi-gcc, CMake) and updates over EtherCAT (FoE).
• Hardware designed in KiCad, published in full.

Out of scope: functional safety. E-stop and STO stay hardwired.

Architecture

          EtherCAT (daisy chain)
LinuxCNC PC ──► [Base board A] ──► [EtherCAT drive] ──► [Base board B] ──► ...
 (IgH master)        │ HE10 ribbon (local bus, not EtherCAT)
                     ├── I/O module 1
                     └── I/O module n

• One generic base board per EtherCAT slave. More axes come from more boards on the EtherCAT chain (8 axes with two boards, 12 with three).
• Extension modules on DIN rail, chained to the base board by HE10 ribbons: slow I/O on SPI chips, without an MCU. A base board and its modules form a single modular slave.

Base board

Schematic and PCB in hardware/base/, generated by script (see below); the PCB is being placed.

The STM32H523 footprint takes any STM32H5 in LQFP-100 (H523, H533, H562, H563) without a PCB change. The board is meant to be fed by a dedicated supply in the same cabinet; the simulation of the input stage and its limits is in hardware/base/sim/.

The board is 107.5 × 150 mm. It mounts on a DIN rail in a Phoenix Contact UM-BASIC 108 profile (housing kit UM-BASIC-KIT-B108-L150-7035), resting on the profile walls at the top level, or screws onto a panel through four M3 holes at the corners, one of them plated to earth the board. A plated hole takes the Phoenix PE contact, which earths the board to the DIN rail. Every edge connector sits on a long edge: the profile closes the short ones; the USB jack is vertical.

Repository layout

The schematic is generated: edit the scripts in hardware/base/gen/, then run python hardware/base/gen/schematic.py, which regenerates it and runs the checks. The PCB is edited in KiCad: after a schematic change, update it from the schematic (Tools > Update PCB from Schematic).

Building, flashing and coding rules: CONTRIBUTING.md.

Licensing

Each file carries an SPDX header naming its license.

Official builds and forks

Official releases will carry the Bornier EtherCAT Vendor ID. Forks distributing hardware or firmware must use their own Vendor ID.

EtherCAT® is a registered trademark and patented technology, licensed by Beckhoff Automation GmbH, Germany.