Need Help! How do you integrate a tool setter probe into a Mitsubishi control?


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Thread: How do you integrate a tool setter probe into a Mitsubishi control?

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    Default How do you integrate a tool setter probe into a Mitsubishi control?

    I'm looking for *any* information from someone with knowledge about how a tool presetter probe is interface to a Mitsubishi control. Ideally I'm looking for information on an older Meldas M3 control and a Renishaw TS27R, but I suspect that this is not all that necessary. The machine I want to adapt is a Dyna Mechtronics DM4400m, although, again, the type of machine probably doesn't matter that much.

    The TS27R is really nothing more than a switch. On my MC161 CPU card the switch connects to CNA18 #1 and #7. The latter is +24VDC and the former is the input pin. Now the problem.... The M3 control (well, all of the Mitsubishi controls) used G37 as the Auto TLM process. I am 99% sure that I have the physical interface working properly. But when I initiate the G37, I never get a length recognition when I manually "trip" the length sensor. There could be a few different reasons for this. First, the manuals make sound like the input I'm using is shared by several SKIP inputs and you somehow tell the control which one to look at. This means I might need an additional command maybe in the code? Is that right? But the manual doesn't mention anything about an input selection. Or maybe this is all vague because it is part of the PLC? I don't really know.

    I also know that Renishaw has a CD with a bunch of macros. I'm not entirely sure how this fits with the functions built into the Meldas control. So, one of my questions for *anyone* that has a Meldas control is.... Do you have macros installed that manage your tool presetter (or touch probe), or do is everything managed by the built in functions of the control?

    Basically, I'm trying to reach out to someone that has some type of probe connected to a Meldas control. We can go from there.

    Thanks!

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    Default Re: How do you integrate a tool setter probe into a Mitsubishi control?

    I figured this out. I ended up integrating into the CNA18 interface's SKIP inputs. In this fashion G31 and G31.2 provide the means to interrupt the movement. The BIG problem was that the firmware on the M3 could not support the Renishaw macros. That was a complete pain to concretely determine. I ended up getting a new firmware cartridge with C0. I don't know when Mitsubishi updated the firmware so it didn't cause problems, but I can concretely say that A3 and old do *NOT* work. I hope to eventually make copies of the EPROMs in case you can't find a newer version.



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    Default Re: How do you integrate a tool setter probe into a Mitsubishi control?

    I didn't completely answer my original request for help, and I firmly believe in trying to give back to the community so that someone else can self-help. To that end, let me explain a bit..

    CNA18 is an interface port on the MC161-1 CPU card. CNA18 has the pins that are high speed interrupt pins bound to the SKIP control. A SKIP control is basically a means of interrupting an operation. This is done by inserting a G31.x (where X can be 1, 2, 3, etc... one for each input pin... G31 by itself implies G31.1). If you've watched any of the thousand videos out there with a renishaw probe, you'll see it advance until it hits a surface. In G code land, that is just a Gxx to move at a specific feedrate BUT there is a G31 added to the command as a modifier. So, even though the move command says to advance 50mm, if the input changes state at, say 10mm, the movement stops/interrupts. Personally, SKIP is kind of a lousy name, in my opinion, but that is all that is really happening.

    Renishaw tool setters and probes work with a set of macros. These handle all of the movements, which are, of course, interrupted by the G31 input changing state. The Renishaw macros then read the current location through common variables and perform whatever action is appropriate. In a tool presetter case, the tool offset will be calculated and the value put into the variable location that is bound to what you see on the screen. Think of these locations as dual ported memory. You can either access them through a graphical user interface (keyboard and screen) or programmatically via a bound memory location. That is *all* there is to it.

    Now for the Meldas M3 specifically.... What I found is that I could not run the macros without getting format errors. It was frustrating.... An out of the box macro would error out in the first 15 lines or so, and the solution was to just remove a comment line. That isn't good... A comment line is functionally irrelevant, so removing it should do nothing at all, but it made all the difference in the world. The implication, of course, was that there was likely a problem with the firmware (basically the operating system of the CNC itself) was malfunctioning. The firmware is stored on EPROMs on this control, and the labels showed this version:

    MC433 261W000-A3
    MACRO 261W610-A1

    Eventually I found another plugin module with the 12 EPROMs that had this sticker:

    MC433 261W000-C0
    MACRO 261W610-A2

    That version doesn't have all the format issues that the original one had. Note that there *are* other firmware versions found out other M3 controls out there that have different part numbers. I cannot tell you which ones work and which ones do not. I only know that I tried two different firmware cartridges which A3/A1 and neither of those worked (likely eliminating corruption of the firmware itself), while the C0/A2 version seems to behave much better (I haven't fully vetted this yet, so there is definitely a TBD in here).

    Feel free to reach out to me if you have a question. I'll help if I can, but please realize that I *am* an amateur. I have learned this stuff by painfully clawing my way up a cliff of knowledge. :-(



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How do you integrate a tool setter probe into a Mitsubishi control?

How do you integrate a tool setter probe into a Mitsubishi control?