Mitsubishi SSCNET

found a meldas 300 controller with most of the parts. got it working and initializing a MR-S11 drive. hooked up a logic analyzer and it looks fairly straight forward... next, i need to get the motor spinning and rig up some kind of an interface board...

finally got the thing spinning with with my new hardware



 

I wonder did you fully reverse engineer the commands for velocity mode?
Are you sending exactly the same values as the original controllers do for the selected RPM?
When I had a look at it last time I found out that the values don't directly translate to the requested RPM value, at least there's no linear mapping, it is a little bit off from time to time.

do you mean for a spindle? haven't looked at it yet.
i would be surprised if servos have velocity control... or do they?

I have also implemented support for MDS-B-SVJ2 Servos via ethernet. That's the first test. X/Y/Z and the spindle are ok (the video only shows X/Y). I will make some other videos within the next weeks. For a test it's connected via USB ethernet adapter to my notebook (I will move it to a raspberry PI within th next days)

Still quite some way to go .. tool changer, lubrication system, chip conveyor and so on. My Meldas M65 controller had issues with the battery 3 times in a row (and we bought them original from Mitsubishi), everytime the settings are gone we would have to drive to Mitsubishi to put the options in... I'm done with that and move the system to LinuxCNC now.

MRx, nice! what hardware are you using?

and i'm still working on the new platform, also with an ethernet interface... now i can have all supported mitsubishi protocols running simultaneously on a single zynq 7010 core ok, 5 of them - parallel bus (MR-S), 2 copper serial (SSCNET I, II, MELDAS 5/6), 2 fiber (SSCNET III, III/H, MELDAS 7, 8). as all of them share the same multiple-of-222us cycle time...

still have the second processor core and a spare PTPv2-capable 1Gb ethernet port to try the CC-Link IE/TSN thing to complete the picture...

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.