Editing RSI templates for ForceTorqueControl v4.0.6

Got a bit of a stumper, here. This involves using FTC 4.0.6, with RSI 4.0.9, under KSS 8.5.7 HF1.

My process requires using SetPublicPar to control certain gains in the FTC application from KRL. But the gains in the FTC application are not Public by default.

Under KSS 8.3 and FTC 3.x, the way I got around this was to use RSIVisual to open up the FTC template file, change the gains I needed to Public, then create or edit my FTC application through the SmartPad menu.

But with these new robots, this dodge no longer works. The file formats seem to have changed, and the new .RSIX files only open in RSIVisual as XML files -- there's no graphical component. Attempting to directly edit the XML files to change IsPublic from False to True (in either the Template or in the FTC Application) causes FTC_INIT to fail, and has a side effect of causing the FTC Config menu on the pendant to stop working -- attempting to open the menu generates a SmartHMI error ("The module [HMIFtCtrlSensor] could not be loaded due to initialization errors.").

So, does anyone have any experience with FTC 4.x, and how to handle changing the template to make elements public? And how to edit the template in RSIVisual? At some point, I'm probably going to need to add some custom elements to the FTC application.

So, there's nothing in the manual (of course not), but after some digging and some help from a colleague, I think I've figured out the general pattern.

In WV 5 or 6, with the RSI and FRC options installed, it's possible to open and edit an FTC application that was created through the teach pendant menus. My issue doing this before turned out to be an extra whitespace that somehow got added to the first line of the XML file, probably while I was trying to hand-edit it.

The new RSI Visual, inside of WV, is... a bit of a mess, graphically. I really hope KUKA cleans it up. But the relevant point here is that, under the new RSI, parameters are no longer set Public by using a dropdown menu, but by clicking on a "padlock" icon on a particular parameter. If the padlock is closed, the variable is not Public. If the padlock is open, the variable is Public.

It'll be a few days before I hear about any test results, but it looks like the FTC/RSI variable names haven't changed between versions, so my SetPublicPar should still work.

As a side note, the RSI manual that came with the RSI version in this robot... still has the instructions for using the old RSIVisual -- no signs of the new programming environment in sight. Talk about documentation lag....