PC app for Quick info/tools

    A while back, I 'developed' an app (I use the word developed very loosely) to help myself quickly access certain tools and information pertaining to Fanuc Robots and other aspects of my job.

    Since a lot of the tools and information were gathered and/or built from the help of many threads on this forum, I decided to strip down my app, and share what I could... Enter FRUIT.

    FRUIT ("Fanuc Robot Useful Info and Tools") is my Windows Forms app which was originally built around Linuxsand's "Know Fanuc" website using the CURL function, to quickly access alarm codes. (I use a program called AutoHotkey to map FRUIT to a custom Keyboard shortcut so that I can quickly open the app, and utilize it's functions.)

    Since then, FRUIT became a lot more, including a simple Robot Commenting Tool, a barebones FTP loading/backup client, and a CM file creation tool. It also has a few other informative tools including a quickly accessible 'library' for System Variables, whose definitions were gathered from descriptions found on this site or dug out of manuals, as well as some that are defined by personal observation.

    I am by no means an App Developer, this is a hobbled together assortment of VB code, that with a lot of trial and error, appears to do what I want it to (at least it does on my PC); I can make no promises that this will work for everyone, or be without some bugs. I can say, it is most likely limited to Windows users, and the FTP portion points to a direct location of FTP.EXE, that may or may not be the same as yours.

    For those that do manage to use it, feel free to share any comments/suggestions, but, at this time, I'm not making any promises of future updates.

    Very nice, thank you for the utility. Often, I have multiple robot's that I would like to backup at once. Can fruit be run from the command line?

    I was using the backup tool from onerobotics which is perfect except it doesn't backup more than 128 files.

    Again, thank you!

    PS: OneRobotics backup tool does appear to work for more than 128 files but sometimes not.

    Edited once, last by jstolaruk: possibly incorrect information (January 24, 2023 at 2:07 PM).

    Quote from jstolaruk

    Can fruit be run from the command line?

    I'm not sure, so probably not, again this really isn't my area of expertise I just hobbled FRUIT together with a lot of trial and error and got it to fit my needs at the time.

    As far as the FTP backup, since you are familiar with OneRobotics, take a look at Jay's Article USING FTP FOR INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY. This is the basics for the FTP backup that FRUIT uses. I basically open FTP, turn off prompting, and then do an "mget *.*" command to get all files.

    I sometimes do FTP straight from the command line, I've also written batch files to do backups for certain customers.

    I'm sure there is a way to have multiple threads run FTP across multiple robots, but if there is that's outside of my wheelhouse. I have run ftp on a "For Loop" to include multiple robots, but it's still backing up one at a time.

    Hope this info is helpful.

    You can multithread your VB code to do multiple robots at once with FTP. You have to use the dotnet FTP methods not the the ftp.exe script.

    It won't be any faster though. Even if multi-threaded, the FTP connection will only service 1 robot at a time, it will just bounce between the different connections. So for example if you have 3 robots to backup and they normally take 1 minute each. If you do 3 at a time asynchronously then they will all happen at the same time but still take 3 minutes to complete.

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