Is the Ecoca EL4610e a good candidate for a retrofit?

Not sure if this thread is still relevant, stumbled across this while researching how to upgrade the operating system on the pc on my machine. But I happen to have the complete electrical schematics for this machine with a mitsubishi meldas magic64 controller. If anyone is interested, I can scan them

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Hello everyone, sorry that I sort of teased this and then took so long to get back. Due to the shelter in place order where I live, I didn't have acces to the documents for a while. They are with me now. It is an approx. 100 page booklet of components and schematics.

Looking at possibilities to upgrade the OS on my controller, examining the electronics in the old workstation and contacting Ecoca & Mitsubishi has made it painfully obvious to me that this machine is a ticking time bomb. It is only a matter of time until I will probably also need to retrofit this machine as no spares are available anymore, and no one even has the drivers for these cards anymore.

Now I know very little about LinuxCNC and linux in general, but I have built a 3D-Printer or two in my life. I know programming basics and enough about electronics to pull of the physical wiring of such a conversion.

However, I am not terribly well versed in the black arts of deciphreing and reverse engineering communication protocols.

Since my machine is still working i probalby still have a bit of time, but I would like to figure out how to upgrade this thing rather sooner than later and start saving for the probably huge amount of money that will be needed for such a project.

In my naive dreams, I somehow hope tthat there is some kind of way to simply hook up a mesa card + daughterboards to the existing drives etc. but after briefly skimming trough the manuals of the servo drives llisted in the electronics manual, I have a sneaking suspicion that these drives run on proprietary mitsubishi protocols and that I will have to buy new ones. The voltage ratings on the ac servos somehow also make very little sense to me, so worst case scenario new motors + new drives if I can't figure this out.

So if anyone has any insight into how to go about a conversion on this machine or if it is even a viable idea, any information would be greatly appreciated.

I am also not sure about forum etiquette around here:

should I simply upload the scan of the schematics or upload it on a separate platform given that it will probably be a pretty big file with ~100ish scans? Is there are preferred platform around here? Preferred file formats?

Also, looking for more information about an actual conversion seems to still be within the topic of this thread, but should I perhaps start a new thread on this or continue to post my own insights here?

In the end, this thread is one of the first results that shows up on google is you search for the make of this machine, so anyone looking for the information will probably land here anyways, but I know every forum has sort of their own practices when it comes to this.

Hope you are all having a Happy new Year

salutations,

MuBe039

If the Mitsubishi SSCNET becomes a stumbling block, there are Linuxcnc compatible drivers here. Very cool
yurtaev.com/

Okay perfect, here is the document:

drive.google.com/file/d/1zGPxt_nuCIpSUkL...z9B/view?usp=sharing

As mentioned before, any and all insights pertaining to a conversion of this machine are greatly appreciated

Very interesting, I will definitely have to get one of these.

Out of curiosity: did you end up buying and/or converting that lathe? Any pointers from someone who has already gone trough any part of the journey that I am probably about to embark on will certainly be useful.

I also have some more documentation on this lathe (mechanical drawings, parts lists etc. ) should you need it

we talked with MulBe039 in email...
the machine has the MELDASMAGIC 64 control which runs on a windows PC with a ISA/PCI interface card. the manual lists
Spindle: MDS-A-SPJ2-75 / SJ-PF7.5-01
X-Axis: MDS-A-SVJ2-03 / HA33NT-A33
Z-Axis: MDS-A-SVJ2-06 / HA40NT-A33
drives and motors (though i suspect a typo and it should read MDS-B-...). those have SSCNET'ish serial interface like all other MDS-A/B/C series drives. -A33 are OSA253 25kcpr absolute encoders. so interfacing servos/spindle to the linuxcnc shouldn't be a problem. the machine seems to have a gearbox spindle and though the spindle drive mostly handles it transparently for the controller, i will probably need to add a few HAL pins to the driver for gear selection. and porting/re-implementing the ladder will require some effort... but all should be doable

MulBe039 wrote:

Very interesting,
Out of curiosity: did you end up buying and/or converting that lathe? /quote]

Sorry no. It was too far away..