To reduce the vibration of cable-stayed bridges, conventional magnetorheological (MR) damper control system (CMRDS), with separate power supply, sensors and controllers, is widely investigated. In this paper, to improve the reliability and performance of the control system, one adaptive MR damper control system (AMRDS) consisting of MR damper and piezoelectric energy harvester (PEH) is proposed. According to piezoelectric effect, PEH can produce energy for powering MR damper. The energy is proportional to the product of the cable displacement and velocity. Due to the damping force changing with the energy, the new system can be adjustable to reduce the cable vibration. Compared with CMRDS, the new system is structurally simplified, replacing external sensor, power supply and controller with PEH. In the paper, taking the N26 cable of Shandong Binzhou Yellow River Bridge as example, the design method for the whole AMRDS is given, and simple formulas for PEH are derived. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive control system, the performance is compared with active control case and simple Bang-Bang semi-active control case. It is shown that AMRDS is better than simple Bang-Bang semi-active control case, and still needed to be improved in comparison with active control case.