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Ben....
Shoot me a private message and I'll give you my email and, possibly, we can talk on the phone if you are in the States. I've added a 4th axis to my M3 control, but that shares pretty much the same boards and OS as the 500. My guess is that it is similar. I'm familiar with the MR-Sxx drives, but not the MDS-A guys. In fact, you have me scratching my head on that one. The M3 system uses a proprietary interface. If you have an MC161-1 CPU in your system, you are likely using the same interface, which is basically an IDC50 connector. I have only seen one type of drive that interfaces with that setup, and it is the MR-Sxx series. So, part of me is wondering I'm wrong an the M500 is the next generation of CPU. If so, then I'm likely not going to be a ton of help.
ON EDIT:
OK, I just pulled some pics up on the M500. It does, in fact, have a different card cage and interface. However, I've got a sneaky suspicion that the whole setup may just be an updated version of the M3xx series. I say this because it is amazing how similar much of the Mitsu stuff is. Even though my machine is going on 30 years old, many of the manuals and such for much newer controls are amazingly relevant. There are several reasons for this but the most important one is money. It is expensive (and risky) to develop a completely new stack every few years. CNC controls are not like cars where there is a huge economy of scale. So, they probably are updating CPUs, taking advantage of newer, high density chips, using more ASICs (but internally having much of the same functions, etc). The old MR-S11 drives are gigantic (but, thankfully, that makes them easier to work on...) and that 50 pin IDC connector is huge. Why use something that big when you have newer connection technologies?
The point is this... I have been thinking of reverse engineering the MR series connection so I could eventually use other drives. That is great for me because I could use yours. That doesn't help you directly, but in my casual searching on that, I did find that there is one guy that has already reverse engineered the MDS connection/protocol. I found this over a year ago, and I don't recall exactly where I located it. I did briefly communicate with him, though, so I might be able to find him through that. Part of the trouble there, however, is that I think he was in an Eastern Block country. If he is in Ukraine or Russia, well, who really knows if you'll be able to contact him now. :-( Neither of those places is exactly an area where anyone is thinking about ancient CNC stuff, of course.
But, getting back to the point, there has been some activity on the MDS connector type drives. One thing to be aware of though... Mitsubishi works on a model where you maintain all of your parameters in the control. The drives typically have EEPROM in them, but clearly there is some handshaking that goes back and forth in the param stuff. If the control can't do that, it will likely complain and not work. Because that whole approach is very proprietary, it is highly unlikely that you'll just be able to fabricate a wiring harness and plug it into your whiz bang cheapo drive that you bought on eBay. :-( You are almost certainly going to have to go through some custom circuitry to convert from Mitsu land to "other"...
Hope this helps....
Originally Posted by MrMetric
