Is technology package programming a dark art?

For most Tech Packages, all the KRL code is fully accessible in the R1/TP/ subdirectory specific to that package. I've spent a lot of hours "hacking" various TPs to make them work in ways they were not intended to.

There are some TPs that involve deeper changes that aren't just KRL -- Force-Torque Control and RSI come to mind. But for most TPs, you should be able to follow every subroutine call back through the added modules.

It's often not easy, b/c the KUKA TPs tend to be very complex, in order to support many different options, and they devote large amounts of code to strong error handling. But it's not beyond anyone who understands how programming works and is willing to devote the time to really drill deep into the TPs.

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Reading through the variables that was given in this manual and some vague explanations about what should happen.

I felt completely in the dark, not knowing where to start, what conditions to include in each function etc.

i hear you, but try reading some vague forum posts, not mentioning KSS version, or tech package version, etc.

btw. same thing can be implemented differently in different versions and some version may not even have it

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Is there an actual course or documentation to go through that will assist

if you have tech option, it will have the correct manual... but we don't know the version of what you have there.

i always like to recommend reading READ FIRST... if the goal is to get an answer that resolves some issue.

but that is not needed if the discussion is meant to be purely philosophical like "what if...", " or "is it a dark art"

spot welding is normally done with help of tech package. not all of them will have same features and even if they do, there is no guarantee that they may be implemented the same way or documented as well. the way i think of it at the moment, background tip dressing is simply process that runs asynchronously from the robot task and should only need some I/O to control. in case of KRC4 controller, ServoGun TC tech packages before version 4.1 did not even have background tip dressing so this would be something integrator had to do from scratch. also there is more than one ServoGun tech package (TC, FC..)

in other words if "someone else accomplished it before" may not be even comparable to what you may have there.