Greetings programs hive mind! (how many people will get that reference, I wonder?)
As someone new to PickTool, I have what feels like a stupid question, but I haven't found anything in the PT manual that addresses this clearly.
How does PT keep Pick/Drop positions separate for different parts? My situation is thus: Line-tracking to pick parts from an infeed conveyor, dropping to a fixed station (no 'palletizing', so the FS is set up as a Tray with only one Layer and one Cell). Picking is carried out by PK_CV_PICK11, and the Drop is carried out by PK_FS_DROP11.
Both of these programs use a single PR to store the taught Pick (PR57) and Drop (PR63) positions. But this robot is intended for general use for a lot of very different parts. For the worst-case example, one part will need to be picked with the end effector roughly 15deg off vertical, then dropped with a 90deg rotation in X or Y, with the end effector effectively horizontal.
In the irPickTool Recipes, there's a page to set the "reference position" for picking from the conveyor, which appears to be individual for every Recipe. But there's nothing equivalent for the Drop program.
So...
- If I TouchUp the Pick PR on the pendant, will I damage something fatally? Do I have to only TouchUp the Pick position from the irPickTool page?
- How do I keep the different Drop positions separate? I can only TouchUp the Drop PR on the pendant, so it would seem like, if I TouchUp for one part, I'll wreck the Drop positions for all the other parts.
- The Drop motion looks like this: L PR[63:Dp1 FS Ref Pos] 1000mm/sec CNT0 VOFFSET,VR[2] TB R[145]sec,CALL PKGROPEN("Gripper ID"=R[104:Gripper Id G1],"Start Zone"=R[107:Counter G1],"End Zone"=R[106:Gr EndZone G1]) ;
- My initial thought was that, if I let the PickTool program run normally to pick the part, then stop it before it gets to the Drop position, VR[2] will be loaded with some sort of offsets unique to that Recipe's Drop position. But the manual says that whenever the "Subtract VR from PR" prompt comes to, to answer "No". So I honestly don't understand how this works.