Easter Eggs?

    Because it came up in a discussion yesterday while polishing up an in-house HMI for a new system... Have you ever added, found, or been haunted by an easter egg or other "undocumented feature" in an industrial robot? Would love to hear your funny stories here (if you are at liberty to share).

    Well, there was the HMI whose "Help" button went to a very well-drawn cartoon of the programmer who wrote the HMI standing over a smoldering robot wreck and saying "I don't know!". That project was very stressful, people got a bit weird.

    Then there was the time that someone rather meanly changed a robot error message to "Part dropped like (X)'s hair!" X was undergoing male-pattern baldness at the time and was apparently rather sensitive.

    I don't recall ever dong any of these myself, since in those two cases I got an early taste of customers going ballistic over such things and making everyone miserable.

    I had a customer at a foundry in Pennsylvania many years ago who employed just one person with the knowledge to program ABB robots, and he was bitter and strange. Went out there for a service call and found robtargets named all manner of inappropriate things. Milder examples I can remember were "titty" "buttcrack" and "cleavage". It got way worse than that. About a year later I had another service call out there and the guy was gone and all his programs had been completely wiped.

    Not really an "easter egg" per se. But I'm sure he thought it was hilarious.

    I was on a job years ago where we would test the robot's EOAT sensors on startup. This would make a loud metallic clap sound since we were closing metal on metal without a part. I made it clap out the time occasionally. The PM was not a fan.

    Not sure if this counts as an easter egg, but another time was where the robot had a large metal spike as part of its tooling. I nick named the robot "Stab-a-tron". The buzzkillington senior engineer in our group called it unprofessional, and another refused to be anywhere near it after I gave it the name.

    Occasionally with iRVision systems I'll write short messages in the training mask of the GPM tools. I wonder if anyone has ever found one.

    Check out the Fanuc position converter I wrote here! Now open source!

    Check out my example Fanuc Ethernet/IP Explicit Messaging program here!

    One time a colleague put my name on the UALM of a FANUC robot, we make a test program, and of course we forget to delete it after.

    Some YEARS after, a maintenance guy from this customer sent me a message like: did You ever heard about FANUC viruses? And me: what?

    So he sent me a photo from my name being displayed on teach pendant. :kissing_face:

    Quote from ColoradoTaco

    Was this robot working in sand-casting by chance? Most prominent use of robo-spikes I've ever seen was stabbing vent holes in sand casting molds.

    No, the robot was in an R&D lab and I was using the spike to evaluate how accurate various vision algorithms were.

    Check out the Fanuc position converter I wrote here! Now open source!

    Check out my example Fanuc Ethernet/IP Explicit Messaging program here!

    Quote from massula

    One time a colleague put my name on the UALM of a FANUC robot, we make a test program, and of course we forget to delete it after.

    Some YEARS after, a maintenance guy from this customer sent me a message like: did You ever heard about FANUC viruses? And me: what?

    So he sent me a photo from my name being displayed on teach pendant. :kissing_face:

    I've heard of certain people getting their phone numbers built into certain system error messages, but I've never seen it in the field. Closest I ever came was someone writing my phone number on the inside of a cabinet, which resulted in a very confusing call many years later about a machine I hadn't heard from or thought about in 10 years.

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