Heidenhain machine monitoring, over its own OPC UA NC Server
Heidenhain sells its own OPC UA add-on for current TNC 640-class controls, built to the same companion-specification approach umati standardizes across brands. Older TNC controls fall back to Heidenhain's proprietary DNC interface instead.
OPC UA NC Server: an activatable Heidenhain option
On TNC 640-class controls, Heidenhain sells the OPC UA NC Server as an option a machine owner activates — an operating-system-independent interface Heidenhain describes as built for the industry standard the machine-tool sector is converging on. It supports up to six simultaneous OPC UA client connections, enough for a monitoring gateway to coexist with other software already reading the control.
Being an option means it isn't automatically present on every TNC 640-class machine — it has to be purchased and enabled, which is exactly the kind of thing the fleet survey confirms per machine rather than assuming from the control model alone.
Built on the same standard umati defines
The machine-tool industry's umati initiative standardizes what a conformant machine should publish over OPC UA — state, program, overrides, counts — in a predictable shape regardless of brand (see how OPC UA works). Heidenhain's OPC UA NC Server is built on the same companion-specification approach, which is what lets a monitoring gateway treat a Heidenhain control's published data the same way it treats OPC UA data from any other umati-aligned machine tool, rather than needing brand-specific parsing.
Older controls: the DNC fallback
The OPC UA option doesn't exist on Heidenhain's older TNC generations — the iTNC 530 and TNC 320 among them. Those controls instead expose Heidenhain's own DNC interface (option 18), part of the RemoTools SDK: a proprietary connection built on Microsoft's COM standard over TCP/IP or a serial link, using the LSV-2 protocol underneath.
| Control generation | Connection path |
|---|---|
| TNC 640-class (current) | OPC UA NC Server — Heidenhain's own optional add-on, umati-aligned. |
| iTNC 530 / TNC 320 (older) | Heidenhain DNC (option 18), part of RemoTools SDK — proprietary, COM/TCP-IP based. |
Our approach:DNC is a real, documented interface, but it's a proprietary Windows application interface rather than an open industrial protocol — so where a fleet has older TNC controls without the OPC UA option, we connect them at the depth their actual interface supports and label it honestly, the same practice as digital I/O for machines with no modern data interface at all.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
If it's a current TNC 640-class control, Heidenhain sells the OPC UA NC Server as an activatable option — not built in by default, but a Heidenhain-published add-on rather than a third-party bridge. Older controls like the iTNC 530 or TNC 320 don't have this option and use Heidenhain's proprietary DNC interface instead.
Up to six OPC UA client applications can connect to one TNC control's OPC UA NC Server simultaneously, per Heidenhain's own product documentation — enough headroom for a monitoring gateway to sit alongside other shop-floor software reading the same control.
Umati ("universal machine technology interface") is the OPC Foundation-backed effort to standardize what a machine tool publishes over OPC UA, regardless of brand. Heidenhain's OPC UA NC Server is built around the same OPC UA companion-specification approach umati defines, aligning Heidenhain's published data with the same standardized shape other umati-aligned controls use.
Those controls predate the OPC UA option and instead expose Heidenhain's proprietary DNC interface (option 18), part of the RemoTools SDK, built on Microsoft's COM standard over TCP/IP or a serial link. It's a real, documented interface — just not an open industrial standard the way OPC UA is, so we treat machines on it more like the digital-I/O tier for depth-of-connection purposes rather than assuming DNC-level richness.