Mitsubishi SSCNET

I also ordered some Ethercat boards to play around with it, for now I just use regular Ethernet. I will suspend working on it until after chinese new year since I need connectors.
I also hope I can get hands on more Mitsubishi/possibly other machinery in Taiwan.

Chaining up multiple boards with Ethercat seems to be interesting, especially for the peripheral part.

The Zynq is definitely super powerful, I was able to get away with a microcontroller and accurate timings.
But the MDS-B series only needs 3.55ms framing, not 0.222, jitter is around 20ns (while the measured jitter on the Meldas M65 controller is 40-60 ns .. of course all relatively due to my non certified measurement equipment).
My plan is to make it pretty much modular with Ethercat chaining up various modules for certain tasks.
I want to mix my system with different motors than Mitsubishi for 5 axis support.

I have an old DE2 FPGA board (with ethernet), and a couple of LatticeSemi LFE3/5 boards (also with Ethernet) here which I almost wanted to use for it. I think I will just stick with various microcontrollers and small FPGAs if needed to keep it simple in the future.

I've finally gotten a little time to work on this again!

I'm still planning to use the MR-J3-70A drives, which I have already. What is the current state of support for the copper network drives?

MR-J3-A (as well as MR-J,J2,J2S,J4,J5-A) drives have generic pulse train position or +-10V analog speed and/or torque control

MR-J,J2,J2S-B - copper SSCNET I/II control interface
MR-J3,J4,J5-B - optical SSCNET III or III/H
MR-J5-G - CC-Link IE TSN over gigabit Ethernet
MR-J5-G-N1 - EtherCAT

and some more cross-generation mating... the MDS-E-V2 drive (2024) happily talking to the MDS-A-CR (1995) power supply without any persuation...

Would you be willing to share any details of the protocol? Specifically for MDS-B? I'm trying to do the opposite of you, implement a device that emulates a MDS-B drive to a Meldas 600M control, and drive my custom built 4th axis from it.

i can, if you ask a specific question. obviously i don't have a written specification to share.
but maybe it is possible to adapt your 4th axis to use a mitsubishi dtive/motor? would be much easier..