Fanuc Cognex Setting

You have to write KAREL code to handle these data from Cognex camera. Data are transmitted over TCP/IP.

Cognex In-sight manual - Robot Communications - FANUC Robot Controller - Ethernet Communication

These software options are needed:
- KAREL (R632)
- User Socket Msg (R648)

Once, I wanted to use Cognex camera for robot positioning. Later I used different solution but meanwhile I recieved some manual from Cognex (it uses Karel as linuxsand said), maybe it will help.

Tomas

Quote from MattFuller

Thought I would throw this out there... I noticed a setting in Cognex In-Sight Explorer that I had not seen before. I've been trying to figure out a way to pass positional data from a Cognex camera directly to the robot controller without having to purchase Fanuc's stuff. I can see that the camera is putting the data out there using the Ethernet Native setting, but I'm not sure how the robot would receive the information... Any of you seen this setting and used it before? Is this what it's supposed to do?

I promise you it's not that easy to do. You will need to develop a karel program for this and the one that Cognex has does not work at all.

WHat controller are you using?

It may just be easier to add a PLC to talk over ethernet to the camera, then from the PLC ethernet to the robot. That's what I typically do.

We tried this same method with Keyence. It was a mess and completely not worth the time, ended up sticking with iRVision instead.
We lost several days trying to get the Keyence to work and we even had Keyence come here to assist us.

Hi,

I'm trying to do the same procedure as you,

Quote from MattFuller

We're using an R30-IB Mate Controller

Did you achieve to do the camera robot & connection ?

I have integrated a Cognex camera using TCP/IP. I used User Socket Messaging in Karel to send Native Ethernet commands to the camera.

If I could rewind time, I would have pushed to purchase the Ethernet/IP package from Fanuc and used that for communication. It would have been a better solution and it would have been cheaper due to the additional hours required to write the Karel program.

A few oddities that I encountered:

1. It took about 45 seconds to do any action such as set camera offline, change job, set camera online. I don't think this is normal, but that was the case for me.

2. There is a lengthy initialization process where after connecting to the camera I would receive a login prompt message, I would send credentials, get a message that the login succeeded, etc.

3. I had intermittent network communication errors. This is not caused by the use of TCP/IP but it was troublesome because there was no way to detect the problem until I requested data from the camera and received no response. Then I would have to go through the initialization again. Ethernet/IP can detect an interruption and reconnect.