Faulty motherboard on the computer

No there is not. The board inside KUKA controllers are soecial made for support of VxWin as dual OS with a real-time VxWorks combined with Windows.

Fubini

Fubini , can I ask why?

Looking at this krc2 HW it looks like a really standard pc hardware with some low level i/ofrom mfc, that jurassic kvga and a fieldbus board (sercos fc in my case). Plus A dc dc power supply with some control hw.
Has absolutely anyone tried sticking a similar board there until today? Maybe a Pentium IV or smth from that era?

As long as the windows xpe recognises the new hw, it should work. Virtual machines should not care about the host computer’s HW as long as they are present. Even the control HW drivers are inside vxworks itself.

Kuka bios is all locked, i think, to avoid people messing around and tweaking things then asking for support. We do this every time when developing hw products. Get a standard HW and just lock it to protect the client from himself and avoiding non working conditions caused by sw, there are hard to contest in the warranty, like a HW overclock frying the cpu, underclock to sae evergy and heat and so on.

just wonders from a hardware developer at pcb level. 😅 did i say something that proved to be a stupid idea before?

I didn’t notice as well of people fixing this kinda hw. Not a common practice? Motherboard, dcdc supply, kps?

One resaon is that the special KUKA Windows Embedded Software Image will not have the necessary drivers for custom boards and their components. It is not a standard windows image but one designed for the KUKA boards and Software including everything for Real-time control by VxWorks. Nothing else.

A second reason is that hardware components on the board are selected by higher specification standards than standard private home computers. A standard board with cheaper components will probably not be able to keep up with real-time controlling of a robot. That is not what they are build and designed for.

I know from the past that some people tried but never heard of a successful attempt. Also in this forum some users asked the same questions in the past.

Fubini

Thank you.

I work with real time systems and I have serious doubts only about the second point you made.

the only difference from a real time system to a non real-time is how the software scheduling is made. any system can take care of real time calculations if you provide a software that manages the HW in that way. (VXWorks in this case)

What you call cheap components are just simplifications in the specs of some parts to lower the costs, as capacitors and some circuit architectures. It will probably not run for 20 years in a high temperature environment like a high end server or industrial PC (KRC for instance) but as long as it runs, it should do the same job. Mine is from 2008 and still running (when it doesn't freezes on the first boot. ).

the XPE drivers for a slightly newer board would probably be a headache. It should be really worth the robot to make me spend the time needed to assembly such a frankenstein.

Do you guys have defective boards btw? would be nice and save lots of bucks to everyone if we could find out the main culprits and develop PROPER ways to fix old robot HW. not nice to throw away a 2Kusd board if it can be properly fixed with 1/4th of the price.

what do you say about this Idea?

Uros Marinkovic would you be down to fix the main board if it was possible?

Hello, maybe you could also try and replace the swolen capacitors on the motherboard? In the past I have repaired some of the motherboards just by replacing the swolen ones and the motherboard work again.

since KRC2 hardware is no longer made, repairing existing hardware (such as motherboard) is the only way to retain compatibility and prolong the life of the system. given the scarcity and cost of such parts, repair also makes sense. the problem is that troubleshooting and finding exact defect is not that easy and only few people may have the the right tools or an idea what to look for. replacing capacitors is a low hanging fruit as electrolytic capacitors are components that age fast... they are worse than rest of the parts on the board but cheap and easy to replace so one may just go for it anyway. cell phone repair shops are everywhere and they can easily do replacement of defective components. the challenge is to find the problem. and finding problem may need access to board level while it is running (or trying to). but raised components (CPU heatsink, memory modules, MFC board....), missing rest of the system and slow boot time would limit access and impede testing. hopefully one can try powering naked board and check voltages, or use thermal imaging to locate anything drawing excess current. with more than one board one can compare measurements etc. given enough time everything is repairable.