motoman UP6 with XRC controller won't boot up

hi all, i have a new to me Motoman UP6 with a XRC controller. i am pretty new to robots, this is my 2nd robot, and none of them work.

so i hooked up the UP6 last night for the first time. i think the unit has been sitting for several years in a hot house warehouse. long story short. the robot fired up last night ok and as expected had a battery alarm. I had removed the 2 cell battery from the arm to work on making a new one. i put together a 2 cell battery and all seemed good with the battery. Installed the battery and powered up the XRC, and the pendant said self diagnostics, and then after a few seconds the pendant teach screen went to blue. and nothing. The brake release system still works, the keypad still beeps, but stays blue.

next i unplugged the pendant with the unit under power and plugged it back in the screen comes back on and says booting and then never finishes booting. while booting several pendant keys are lit up.

So i either get a short diagnostics screen then blue, or forever booting

any ideas are appreciated.

i have had pretty good luck with motoman support, but they are closed until monday,

thanks

thanks for the reply. Is there anyone who repairs boards. Or is it just easier to buy a used one on the internet.

Also. There are lots of trouble shooting instruction in the manuals. But they all start with a error code. So if you can't boot there is no trouble shooting help.

Is there a way to. Communicate with the controller with a rs232 connection. Or serial connection and a terminal emulator?

My other robot is a crs f3 with a bad pendant so the only way to do anything there is with a terminal emulator.

Is there a way to diagnose which would be bad the pendant or the board?

Thanks

YEAH, robot not dead. and a big shout out to Motoman tech support, Everyone of them that i talked too was super nice and totally awesome. Even today when i had to do a complete new setup in Japanese. Also google translate is pretty amazing, not totally amazing, but it got the job done, Translating in real time from the pendant in Japanese to english , while at the same time talking to tech support.

My problems are pretty simple. i was replacing the batteries, and i unplugged the CMOS battery while the XRC was powered down, and that is all it takes to mind wipe a Yaskawa robot back to factory fresh, Japanese language only.

oh and i am not sure but there may have been a leg of 3phase power that was under voltage.

I am running a rotary phase converter at 220v 3phase into the transformer and tapping 220v 3phase out of the transformer, so i think the transformer was causing just enough voltage drop to maybe not let the system boot up. but i am not sure about that. But easy enough to fix, just bypass the transformer completely. and no more under spec voltage on the one leg.

i also learned that the high leg on the rotary phase converter is the manufactured leg. i had that backwards in my head.

I mistakenly thought that the single phase legs would me bumped up in voltage by the manufactured leg, but i guess it is just the opposite. the manufactured leg is the highest voltage, . My end result on leg voltage is 243 on 1,2, 222 on 1,3 and 208 on 2,3, which is good enough.

I still have to make up a new 3p cell for the encoder memory, then i should be up and running.

the robot is up and running. Who would have thought, but programming robots is pretty hard. I am slowly working through the manuals and teaching myself how to program. So far all i have got correct is simple four move joint move programs using the teach pendant.

I am trying to save a copy of the CMOS files, but i am now having a issue with the format of the memory card I want to use. From tech support; I need a " windows 95 or 98 " FAT16 formatted memory. I was told it has to be formatted to FAT16 in a older version of windows, and that a FAT16 from Windows 10 or XP will not work.

So am am working on that.

Any help there would be appreciated. I have to go to work tomorrow for a few days. but my thought was to try and get a Windows 98 to run in a Virtual PC / Box environment and format my SD card to FAT16 in a virtual environment, then put the SD card into a PCmcia to SD adapter.

Any help on that would be appreciated

thanks

i am getting back to the a bit. i had a car crash that is now taking up too much of my time.

i got a pcmcia card adapter to SD card to mini SD card adapter. but the smallest SD or micro Sd card i have or can get is now about 8Gb.

I have a friend who thinks he has a copy of Windows 98. I am hoping that will work. but i have a concern that the 8gb is going to cause a problem.

will the size of the memory device cause a problem? the guy with the windows 98 thinks i should be able to partition the micro SD card and only format a specified size of the card to the FAT16 .

motoman said they would send me a quote for a OEM memory card, but i never heard back from them

thanks for the help so far. But it will be slow going on the robot for the next few weeks

thread revival time.

There was a fair amount of outside interest with the same questions i had about the 3 phase power for this control. So here is the update.

I purchased a new new rpc from american rotary . I got a 5hp middle of the line model, not the fanciest. The robot seems to be working fine.

Interesting thing though. The new rpc has approx the same voltage spread across the legs as my home made rpc did , just at the high side of the voltage spec, where my home made rpc was operating at the lower end of the voltage spec.

also i re-connected the factory transformer to the system to hopefully bring down the highest voltage leg. It did not work.

But this robot has been sitting long enough that it either needed to work or go away. so trial by fire , and it seems to be ok. There is a big sticker on the xrc that reads 240 volts also gave me a bit of re-assurance.

Well on to todays question. the robot is working well enough to put into service. and i want to make a semi portable unit out of this. so basically a rolling table with the controller underneath as ballast and the robot on top.

The question is has anyone mounted a XRC controller NOT on vertical? I would like to mount the control on a side to control the stack height of this thing. So either door up on the bottom of the table with vent fans down. Or lay it on its side power supply input area facing down.

any one with experience on that?

Next i need to get the IO working on it. but it is still very slow going as i only have one day a week to work on all the projects

yaskawa tech support says should not be a problem to mount the xrc on its side. they really are a good bunch