New to Kawasaki. Really struggling with setting up an Ethernet IP scanner device

    Hello all. I'm very new to Kawasaki after being used to ABB and Fanuc for most of my career. I have an MX350L robot on an E controller, and right now I'm just playing around trying to familiarize myself with the programming environment.

    Right now I have a small test network setup with an Allen Bradley PLC, a Balluff input block, and the robot. I have the robot connected to my switch via port 2, and everything is assigned a 192.168.11.xxx address. I was able to establish comms between the PLC and robot as an adapter, however I am really struggling getting the robot to communicate with the IO block as a scanner.

    Attached is a pic of my PLC config to talk to the robot, my network setup for the adapter, and my config settings for the scanner device. The pic also shows the assembly and input/output instance settings for the Balluff block from the manual. If I make the PLC the owner of the Balluff block with these settings, it works just fine. But I want the robot to have control over this device, not the PLC, and that's where I'm running into trouble. After I set this all up and run the TYPE EIPSTATUS(1) command in KRterm, I always get a 0 indicating that there are no communications between the robot and the Balluff block.

    I should mention that I am referencing the General Fieldbus I/O Usage Manual. And I should also say that it is somewhat confusing for me. I don't really understand what the manual means when it talks about allocating signals as master or slave. I'm not used to seeing this terminology anywhere except for when I've worked with Devicent in the past. I also cannot seem to get the ZSIGSPEC command to work, as KRterm says the operation is not allowed. On top of that, I don't really even understand what this command does, as the manual does not do the best job spelling it out in layman's terms.

    Any direction on this would be super appreciated, thank you.

    Could be many things as ethernetip is very critical for correct values to be applied.

    Do you have error code displayed when you see monitor screen on teach pendant for ethernetip?

    I see you have 32 signals set for local use, are you using 1TW board or ArmID board for this?

    I have configured 3x Balluff IO blocks for direct control from robot successfully without PLC attached.

    (application did not have PLC installed).

    So I can confirm these following modules work correctly direct control from robot as scanner setup:

    - 3x Balluff BNIEIP 302-105-Z015 16in/16out.

    Where are you intending Balluff IO Block to be allocated:

    - What allocation range is set for PLC - Starting and Ending and number of bytes.

    - What allocation range is set for BALLUFF - Starting and Ending and number of bytes.

    Please check your producing and consuming values are not the wrong way round.

    (This can only be confirmed with your .eds for your Balluff IO Blocks).

    Please check 32 bytes shared memory offset........I question this value.

    - But this depends on where Balluff allocation sits - is it before PLC or after PLC signal allocation?

    If last window You have attatched is from Balluff software config You have IP adress misspeled and it is out of robot's subnet.

    Other tahna that ples provide eds. file or at lest Balluff IO module name os it is possible to check configuration manual for that product.

    In eds file check for connection type as setting it to multicast where point2point is expeced or vice versa leads to connection trubles.

    You can also checconnection ststus and error code via monitor menu -> Software EthernetIP status

    There You will have link status and error cod if devices can see each other but some settings are incorrect.

    Thanks for the replies guys. That last picture of the Balluff config is just from the manual, so that IP address is not reflective of what I'm actually using. All are on the same subnet and I can ping all devices from my PC. I do have the EDS as well and did verify that producing and consuming values were correct. Like I said, I'm extremely new to the Kawasaki system and right now I'm just using equipment we have around the shop to teach myself.

    Unfortunately, I am on the road now for a different job and can't look into some of your suggestions right now. Hopefully I will be able to later this week and provide an update.

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