Using large programfiles with S4C control system or streaming information CNC

[kajakmannen]

Hi

I have a IRB 6400 S4C robot which is going to be used for rapid prototyping with CNC spindle.

Orignaly the control cabinet only have 3,5" disc station which can not handle the files that we are talking about here. The controler has one memory card installet but no expansions yet.

Have tried to lod rapid files produced in IRBCAM.

Does anyone have recomendations for how to be able to handle larger files. USB conversion kit, Ethernet card kit, etc. 
Any suggestions??

Thanks in advance / Anders Lindström

 

[ABB robter]

I had a cutting file project and we ended up using a Visual Studio plug in and writing directly to the robot data IE robtargets, pos array's. I also used a FTP transfer to the hard drive then used the load module instruction to get the program in the robot but this was tricky because syntext must be correct.

[Ztek]

Hej kajakmannen, låter som om du är svensk?

But I think we better write in english here so others can use the information too.

Swerob (www.swerob.se) have a floppy disk replacement for ABB robots, where you use a SD card instead. But I am not sure it is possible to handle bigger files then 1.44 MB anyway.

One other way is to use webware from ABB, if you controller supports that.

I would probably use RS232 and write some simple routine for filetransfer, either one that reads the whole file at program start och some kind of background task that reads command in realtime during the program. There is a lot of file handling and communication commands in Rapid.

[charon.82]

Hi,

We tried to implement similar project with IRC5 controller last year. Even we can transfer our cutting file with USB stick, RAPID editor couldnt handle big files and didnt open process module. i cant remember generated error code right now but we had to divide prg. module into four and Load/Unload modules respectively.

I also attended a workshop with IRBCAM at our company site. We used S4C-6400 like you but handle simple models for testing purposes and hadnt experienced any transfer problems with floppy.

BR.

[kajakmannen]

Hi

Thanks for the replies.

Jupp jag är svensk :D but lets keep it in english ;)

I have ordered a USB disk floppy replacement unit to get rid of the floppy related problems. Unfortiounatly the USB drive just an USB memory formated to look like many floppy disks (i.e. No possibility for handling larger files).

I also talked with Global robots in England and they have sucessfully used S4C M97 robot with installed ethernet card and the largest memory card to dripfeed the milling files into the controller. In other words a automated way of using many floppy sized files.

Otherwise you could do the CAM preparation with CAM software of choice and then divide the fiel into floppy sized files and use floppys but hten you have to change manualy between every disk (bot with floppys and with the USB drive.

Global robots recomended QD Robotics software Robomove which was suppose to be better then IRBCAM but cheaper then Robomaster.


Now I just need to wait for the parts and meanwhile set up the robot properly (wonder how :) see separate thread).

Best regards / Kajaken