Hey Yall,
I was wondering if there was a way to make partial pallets in Pallet tool. Right now I have counter going based on picks, and that works and Index's the pallets just fine but will not reset the robot or tell it to grab another pallet after the indexed pallet is clear.
Before I had just set it to index the pallets when they were full (register 16 i believe?) and that told the robot to grab another pallet after the previous one had been indexed.
Partial Pallets in Pallet Tool
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MechE -
October 23, 2018 at 12:42 AM -
Thread is marked as Resolved.
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Wouldnt u just create a custom unit load that only consists of a partial pallet worth of units? It sounds like you are short cycling the pallet load by forcing it out too soon so the unit load indexer is out of sync. Can u provide more details of what u are trying to accomplish?
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That was an Idea, however my customer has constantly changing pallet sizes based on what their customers order. For example, One customer could order 200 boxes worth of material, while another could order 1000 boxes, so I do not believe changing the pallet size each time is efficient. Nor would I trust the operators to be able to do that without accidentally changing another important value.
I guess the question boils down to; Is there an internal unit counter that I could set to end at a specific value to tell the robot the pallet is done without changing the unit load each time?
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PalletTool has functionality for performing a partial pallet Index from the PLC.
The stock programs for interfacing with a PLC are a bit convoluted, I have standard ones rewritten to make communications easier.
The PLC tells the robot which pallet position to index, and which unit load to switch over to (or stay the same). The robot will then signal for Pallet index once the current cycle is completed.
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If I'm understanding you correctly, the PLC would do the counting then tell the robot the pallet has been completed?
Does it do that by changing R 16? -
I usually have the PLC monitor the Layer/Case count combinations, and once it is correct, initiate a partial pallet change.
Additionally, if the customer always once completed layers, you can have PalletTool only stack upto an XX amount of layers.
If you have access to PalletTool documentation, check Page 5-26 on section: "Changing Layers on the Fly by PLC"
If you are wanting to see at any given time how many layers/cases are on each pallet, let me know, I can send you a Karel program that will read out all that information to Data registers.