Mitsubishi SSCNET

Thank you very much. I got it. One more thing does the new j3-card support handwheel and tool touch setter?

wu-010@163.com wrote: One more thing does the new j3-card support handwheel and tool touch setter?

yes, same as the old one - it has general-purpose inputs and a hardware quadrature decoder. a touch probe/tool setter can be connected to GP inputs, a handwheel encoder A,B phases: TTL to expansion connector directly, differential - via a mezzanine board. the rest is handled by linuxcnc...

put together a small xyz gantry out of parts which were laying around for years and SSCNET III MR-J3-B servos. and tried to kinda push the limits so see what they are capable of:

a little more reverse engineering. recently got a CPU board out of a mitsubishi MDS-DJ-V1 servo drive. those are CNC series drives but they use the same hardware as general-purpose MR-J4-B. the control protocol is different though. don't have access to a working mitsubishi control to snoop the communication. but as i previously spent a lot of time playing with other mitsubishi hardware it wan"t too complicated to find a way into the drive's debug monitor, dump the memory contents and locate the code for control protocol processing. and with a bit of trial and error got the drive running. the protocol turned out to be very similar to sscnet-iii, with differences like 64-bit position command/feedback for "nano control", i presume
i doubt anyone will want to ditch an M700 control for LinuxCNC retrofit anytime soon but as readily avaliable surplus MR-J4-B drives are "convertable" into MDS-DJ with firmware reflash it would be interesting to do it and compare them in some CNC application..

What version of MELDAS is currently supported? I have a machine I'm in the process of fixing with MELDAS M3 controls, and I'd really like to run it from LinuxCNC ultimately.

I have a logic analyzer, can provide traces (when I get to that stage). I'm also very familiar with coding and hardware design. I'm guessing the older protocol would be quite similar to the newer one. Seems a little redundant to start from scratch on the M3 protocol when it's probably similar to work you've already done.

I have a
MR-S3-100AA 3 axes servo controller (integrated in one unit) for the axes
FR-SF-2 spindle drive.

They both connect to the FCA M3 controller on some kind of a bus - it's a big 50-60 pin (the terminator is screwed in right now - I'll remove it and count the pins later) 0.1" IDC-type connector.

I was looking at the YMDS2P card on your website which supports MELDAS and it looks like it only has the smaller connector for the newer bus type. I wonder if completely different hardware is needed, or just some adapters. I think the pin out of the bus connector is in the MELDAS M3 manuals somewhere, but it's been a while since I've looked at them.

I would guess supporting M3 / M5 would open up a lot of machines to easy linuxcnc conversion. There seem to be quite a lot of those machines out there being retired from their first life.

currently i support

MDS-A/B/C-V/SP/SVJ/SPJ servo/spindle with YMDS2P (copper serial)
MDS-D/E servos with YMDS3P (optical)

sorry, i don't support the older parallel bus on MR-S/FR-SF
FR-SF spindle drive, afair, can accept analog speed command

/dmitry