FANUC Robot Remote (TP) and Robot Self-initiated Cycle Start

After over 28 years working with and programming robots, I have to say that the people on this forum put me to shame. I am amazed at the things you guys know and are doing. It makes me feel like a rank amateur. None-the-less, I am very thankful to find a group that can teach me a thing or two.

This remote cycle start and robot self-initiated cycle start has been a challenge I have often run into and have come up with various work-around solutions for different situations. Some are rather Rube Guldberg, but worked.

I really need to understand the options and capabilities better and that is were I was hoping someone here might guide me to the right information or resources.

In a current situation I am working on involves a new FANUC robot. I have wired the UOP fault reset and cycle start to a robot's digital outputs so it can restart itself. There were several reasons for wanting to do this including resetting and restarting after certain errors that did not provide any eloquent recovery solution. The other is to provide a way to restart the robot from the teach pendant. This works for both scenarios, using condition handlers for the first and macros for the second.

However, because the UOP is not the master device the SOP cycle start is disabled. It would be better if the operator could start the robot from either the teach pendant or the controller. I could make this happen in the 'good old days' when I did most of my FANUC programming in KAREL. I could then write a background task that ignored ABORT and could react to the SI[6]. If I would write a TPP that would ignore ABORT, I could do the same with it and start it with $PWR_NORMAL or placing it in $SHELL_CFG.$SHELL_NAME. (I am interested in exploring KAREL again, but the last time I dabbled in it was with winOLPC and I haven't a clue how to do it now . . . but that is another story.)

I appreciate any guidance anyone can provide.

Thank you.

fred@civector.com

Doctor_C,

Thanks for that post. I have wanted to do something more with the webpage, but have often hit brick walls. I think I need to get the HMI device option in order to enable OPC_UA connections so that is in my near-term future. However, I suspect I might run amiss of our IT group using Active X due to security concerns. Maybe not. I am working within our newly configured VLAN that has relieved some of their earlier concerns and opened up opportunities of me to play.

I did play with the PCDK for a short while with a free authorization and was able to do some fun things, but I don't know if it is really worth the license fee. I owe thanks to members of this community for giving me enough hints and help to explore its capabilities.

Right now, I am using Beautiful Soup to scrap the robot websites and pass register data to our SQL server via Python. The intent is to work this into our Ignition system. However, as we add more robots to this, we will need something faster and more efficient.

I did find that I could control the robot's IO with KCL commands via the Ethernet. This gives me a feedback channel for my Python program, which is very helpful.

On the issue I originally posted, I still cannot think of a way to use the robot controller cycle start button when the UOP is the master device without using KAREL. It is proving to be less of a problem than I thought it might be because all the operator has to do to start the cell is turn the teach pendant enable ON, press the POSN key on the pendant, and then turn the teach pendant enable back off. They really like this! All the menus then appear, and they can respond to the prompts and are off to the races.

I know I will continue to have a lot of questions and am glad to know this community exists. I often feel pretty isolated when it comes to having anyone knowledgeable to talk to about this. Hopefully, some of what I have picked up over the years will enable me to contribute something of value to someone else.

fred@civector.com