Proposal : community-based documentation of KRL

Hello,

Lots of people are complaining (understandably) about the quality of the documentation provided by KUKA to its customers.
Indeed we are often left with a bunch of crappy PDF documents, sometimes outdated, sometimes incorrect, sometimes incomplete ...
For a billion dollar company it is quite unfair (personal opinion !).

This forum is a great source of help for many of us, me included. There has been some attempts to propose here more structured documentation (see https://www.robot-forum.com/robotforum/kuk…ented-features/). But the layout of a forum is not really adapted to this need.

So I have been working on a website for that. The source code is open to every one on github and I am looking forward
for comments, suggestions and hopefully for skilled peoples wishing to get involved and to collaborate through the github repo.

• Have a look at the website : https://openkuka.github.io/ and the language reference section https://openkuka.github.io/krl-ref/System.Message/.


• Reach the github repo to collaborate and give suggestions : https://github.com/OpenKuka/Website

Well, clearly not the same.

I've checked your ref (thanks for sharing it) and it is more like a search engine to get a more rapid access to ... the same pdf documents we all know or datasheets.

Not to say it is 550€ a year. So you buy a 100k€ robot and they (intentionally) let you struggle with poor docs. Probably to sell more training and services ...

HTML doc is much more powerful as browsing and indexing is much more performant than in pdfs. You can also leverage cross ref.
You can see it more like a wiki. It's very complementary with the forum. You can start little and grow it with people contributions.

The website I propose is based on Mkdocs. The website is build from a bunch of markdown files (easy to read/write for every body) and simple YAML files for describing KRL types, variables and functions. Thus, it should be easy to contribute for anybody.

My proposal is to focus on KRL :

* system types (enums / strucs)
* system variables / signals
* system functions

And eventually have a sort of up to date "primer" like the expert programming manual.

Hi Spirit532 thanks for your remark,

I agree that version-specific related info should be addressed by such a tool.
At the moment my proposal don't deal with it but I would be happy to listen to suggestions on how to take account for that.
I don't think this is too much work to implement a small filter to hide/show version-specific data.

Internet is a huge mess of (related) informations. But thanks to search engines you can get really fast access to informations. And indeed, it is probably faster for you to google "kuka system variables" to get the corresponding pdf (with a decent internet access) than browsing a 3-levels folder hierarchy on your laptop to get that exact same file !

So I still believe that there is no comparison between something like XPert and a html documentation, much more powerful in terms or searching, indexing and cross-referencing. That said, XPert is a great place to get up-to-date and version-specific official pdf manuals.

Please, try this page https://openkuka.github.io/krl/reference/system.variables/ and let me know if you feel that browsing is more comfortable and efficient on this page than with the good old "System Variables pdf".

Please, note also that my proposal is not to document everything on every subject about kuka... but mainly to provide better access to the language reference. Not to mention that many language functions / variables are not documented at all.