IRC5 TCP/IP and UDP options?

  • Hey, all. Quick question. Our development lab has an old (first-generation) IRC5 that we want to use for testing TCP/IP, and perhaps UDP, communication with a prototype vision system.


    The key factor here is that we'll need to establish the communication in a background task that cycles every 250ms. The robot would need to act as the server, rather than the client. We'll need to open the channel on boot, and keep it open while exchanging ASCII strings indefinitely.


    Now, I used to do RS-232 with IRC5s a long time ago, but never TCP/IP or UDP. So my first question is, does an IRC5 (of this age) support these protocols natively, or would we have to buy add-on options from ABB to enable this functionality?


    Is there a "cut-off age" where our IRC5 might be too old to support these options?


    And (probably the dumbest question): which ethernet port(s) on the IRC5 do we use?

  • The full contents of BACKINFO.TXT. MultiTasking appears to be installed, along with "PC Interface", which... might be the TCP/IP option?

  • This sounds nearly identical to a project I am working on.


    Looks like the ABB supports TCP/IP communications at least back to v5.16. I was able to create a virtual controller that was able to talk via TCP/IP sockets on v5.16.


    Looks like you can create UDP sockets on v6.10, but on the v5.16 version the SocketCreate command is missing the optional \UDP command.


    Edit:

    Also, I believe you would hook up to the LAN port, and then X-start the robot to assign it's IP address. Be sure not to assign the IP address in the same subnet (198.162.125.xxx) as the service port.

    Check out the Fanuc position converter I wrote here! Now open source!

    Check out my example Fanuc Ethernet/IP Explicit Messaging program here!

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