We have 4 robots in our facilities and the pendants on two of them are in pretty bad shape because they've been used as HMI by the operators. The other 2 have PanelView Plus. One of them has the PV plus connected directly to the robot PC with an ethernet cable. I had pretty good knowledge of FactoryTalk and knowhow on most of its features, but I haven't been able to decipher the way this communication take place and how the tags are implemented. I'll appreciate any help on this matter to see if installing a PV on the ones with the bad pendants is a better options than buying new ones since they are really expensive. Please try me as a newbie, I won't be offended.
PanelView Plus to Fanuc Robot
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hacevedo -
February 24, 2017 at 12:11 AM -
Thread is marked as Resolved.
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My point of view:
A PV will not be really useful as teach pendant, so better look to replace or repair.
You know it is possible to bought only screen or keypad or case, etc....
After that, could be a good things to add a PV as HMI for the cell.
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I think he wants to use the panel views as hmi's, instead of using the teach pendant as an hmi.
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Check the I/O menu and see if the robots with the PVs have the UOP (User Operator Panel) inputs & outputs assigned to rack 89 (EtherNet).
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More than likely the robots with the panel views are communicating via the SNPX protocol via the basic hmi option. With this option the robot emulates a GE/Fanuc plc and you can access virtually everything on the robot depending in how you setup the tags via the system parameters.
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exactly as Nation says - it is probably running over SNPX. You can check the assignments in the $SNPX_ASG variable group. There is a separate manual on how to do the assignments, generally it is possible to access a lot of information on the robot: IOs, numeric, string and position registers, alarm history etc.
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Thank you all for your replies. I really appreciated them. bidzej, you mentioned a manual on how to setup the tags, did you happen to know the name of the manual so that I can probably get it from Fanuc. Thanks again guys.
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It's just called HMI User's Manual. The number of the one that I have is MARUCHMID06121E REV A.
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I would suggest opening the HMI Application that is currently running on one of the PVP. Check to see if an OPC driver has been added to the application (Usually this driver is the third object from the top in the Explorer pane). For the AB PanelView+, I use the KEPServer OPC driver to host the tags, which is a third party application that came with my copy of FactoryTalk View. Essentially you create your tags in this Kepserver, and browse for them in your HMI application. This Kepserver is pointing at your Robot's IP address to access the I/O, Registers, etc. when a Runtime is created.
I have used both AB PanelView+ as well as GE QuickPanel+ HMIs for my Fanuc Robots. The GE's are nice because all of your tags are hosted locally on the HMI application.
Hope this helps.