Controlling Air flow through robot.

    Hey everybody,

    So I have a question regarding I/O and tying it to position registers or argument registers.

    If you’ve seen my posts before, I’m a laser engineer who’s now working with mainly robots in order to integrate different robotic applications.

    When you’re laser welding, air flow is a main component to quality welds as well as not spending money replacing cover lenses. On prior jobs I would just turn those bits on and off as needed relative to what position the robot would be moving to; while this works, it leaves my main program really long and messy— I was wondering, is there a way for me to tie those DO’s to certain positions without necessarily making a bunch of position registers? I’ve heard of some people using argument registers to do so.

    I’ve seen a lot of things people are able to do with these robots, especially if they’re knowledgeable in writing Karel; I’m good at C++/C as well as Python so I’m really interested in getting more experienced with the actual computer science side of these machines.

    An argument register it just passing values to another program to do something. They aren't really necessary to accomplish anything in a Fanuc robot, but sometimes they are nice.

    You could create a program that looks at the current position to turn on or off your output, but that seems more messy to me that just explicitly turning it on and off in your program.

    I'm not a laser engineer, but on laser projects I had, we always switched the laser at some specific positions on/off, you won't overcome these special positions. So why not switching the airflow at the same positions? There is no big extra work to do so, you also can tie that DO in a background process to the laser on output.

    Quick idea that came to my mind,

    Have you thought about using the Cartesian Position Check of the DCS system? I know that's for safety issues, but it lets you create 3d monitored areas, and whenever the robot enters those areas, a Background Logic program that you create may activate DOs automatically.

    I don't know if I explained myself correcly, if you need more explanation, just ask!

    "Hell...Yesterday it was workinG... I sweaR" :o)

    Quote from Okami

    Quick idea that came to my mind,


    Have you thought about using the Cartesian Position Check of the DCS system? I know that's for safety issues, but it lets you create 3d monitored areas, and whenever the robot enters those areas, a Background Logic program that you create may activate DOs automatically.

    In that case one can use the space function, there you can define an output that's set automatically when TCP is entering the space.

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