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
