Understood panic mode.
On returning to the machine on Monday, having been on all weekend the system was ready to go.
It would seem the de-charged state of the SLA batteries looks like the likely culprit.
I may well set up an independent 24v stand-by (trickle) charging circuit independent of the cabinet to keep these batteries in good shape without having to leave the whole machine on 24/7.
For now this seems solved! Fingers crossed.
Thanks all for your time and patients!
Right this is interesting.
I wonder what I can do to free up these axes. I see them trying but not getting anywhere. after a few seconds they stop. I assume this is a 'servo time out', as it stops trying to move.
I would love to be mastering but I gotta be moving first! 
It is odd that none of the axes are going anywhere. They can't all be jammed to the same extent.
Unfortunately I'm only getting an hour at a time to investigate this. There is certainly power going to the motors. How curious!
So to wrap up this conversation I will conclude with a brief recap of what I have learned.
Very old KRC1 pendants only have two positions on the deadman switches. Not 3 Unlike newer versions and other robot brands.
T1 mode does not entirely ignore external signals. Some are still needed. In my case ' move enable' was needed to be set as true in the configuration settings. This is done within KSS:(or by PLC)
Configure>I/O>Automatic External
set drives off and move enable to 1025
set external start, drives on, and confirm messages to 1026
Not withstanding PLCs and internal e-stops this allowed me to get my robot engaged and power to the servos.
Divide and conquer. A complex problem is just lots of simple problems crammed together. Thanks all for your assistance.
Hi panic mode,
Yes back up image was good, I had booted from it earlier last week. When I came in this morning the robot was all booted up OK. I had left it running all weekend. It seemed to have downloaded the necessary files! How strange.
I will check the cmos battery regardless tomorrow. I'll stick a voltmeter on it with the cabinet power off and see what it reads.
On another note, my axes still are not moving. They are trying but seem jammed. I gave them a turn with a ratchet socket and they do turn but they are pretty stiff.
Now this was a polishing robot and is caked in waxy compound. I wonder could this have got in to the joints?
I'm very tempted to disassemble A6 and be sure it is clean and try to jog it. No better way to get to know your robot...
I have new batteries and new HDD in there. The only thing I can imagine is that I have not allowed the batteries to reach full charge.
I left the cabinet on over the weekend so I hope the security man has not turned it off!
I did not check yet but I wonder is there a coin cell on the mother board?
Hi roboteers
I'm running a 1998 Win 95 KRC1 and KSS (I don't have the software release at hand) and on the last two boots I have been stuck on 'Downloading System Files'. I have been very patient but still the status bar does not indicate any movement.
It happened before and on a restart it seemed to boot ok. I wonder what I'm doing different. What could be causing this hang?
Thanks !
Indeed there were only threaded plugs, no nipples. All too familiar to me right now.... All axes seemed not to be dry except the A6. I'll oil that next week.
On another thread.. I'm hanging on 'Downloading System Files' starting KSS. I'll start a new topic for this. Thanks for your assistance getting this far!
Superb info again!
SkyeFire I will need to remove the existing pneumatic gripper and replace with a VFD router spindle, hence the Allen keys. I will resist disassembling any more until after I watch the video you recommended.
It seems A1 and A2 have the stacked pair of nuts. The other axes seem just have the small one.
A1 and A2 seemed to squeak a bit. I suspect this is the servo breaks you mention. All axes are now moving, with some effort, but certainly freed up a bit.
Ironically this ceased state might have a benefit as the robot was not parked when it travelled...
I will begin un-caking the wax which encrusts the arm and hunt for these grease nipples.
Thanks for those calibration settings. I will punch them in later today.
I intend to use the robot for one-off sculptural carving. In foam and wood primarily. In that respect I'm thinking I will not need a PLC at all. Certainly some safety cut-out sensors but otherwise I think I can keep it simple.
I will report back with a conclusion to this chapter. Thanks again
Well that was an interesting evening.
The monster lives!
I went Configure>I/O>Automatic External and set $Move_Enable to 1025 and Drives Off to 940. Why 940? Right now I don't know...
Anyway it seemed to work but POP!
As soon as I tried to move a now enabled axis the main breaker tripped and cut the power. But being a stubborn type I rebooted and tried again.
This time on attempting to move an axis I got 1 second of something and then POP again!
I again rebooted and then tried another axis and found it did not move but I could hear the motors trying. Unsurprisingly, I got over-current errors on the KCP.
So now I must get my Allen keys out on free up the joints. I suspect my robot had been sitting still for quite a while. Nothing some lard won't fix...
Again thank you both for your assistance with this journey. I'm optimistic again that this machine will have a second life.
One last question...what values should be in Drives_On and Drives_Off in the configuration in this situation? They will never receive an external signal as my PLC is gone. What should I type in there to keep it happy?
Well maybe I am barking up the wrong tree altogether..
On boot up now I saw
Configuration Error i/o driver INTERBUS.
Can interbus things stop the robot in T1? I had assumed that PLC related communication would be totally ignored in the T1/T2 position.
A little background might be appropriate here. This robot was a polishing machine in it's former life. There were 4 interbus PLCs in various cabinets associated with the cell.
After a little prodding of menus I came across the screen in the attached image. Could this be my mystery Inhibitor of Active Commands?
I hope remarking some bits of the INI can solve this...
Thanks again for your attention!
Hi again SkyeFire
My relays seem ok, as far as I can test they are not fused/welded and all move happily with voltage applied. Visually the contacts look clean also. I did notice evidence of new soldering. All the capacitors associated directly with the relays seem fresh and one of the relays also. (top right in the photo)
Two curiosities here. Power connector X926 was not connected. In fact the plug doesn't even reach it. Also the plug has but 1 wire!
Secondly X925 has no ribbon cable associated with it. I don't see any sign of it.
I just wonder what I am not seeing here. It wonder is there mystery e-stop or safety thing happening that isn't being flagged in the log.
As I reassemble I will reseat the ribbon cables at both ends. Worth a shot...
Thanks SkyeFire,
Perhaps the X11 pin designations I'm seeing on my paperwork are outputs not inputs. I will go forward with-out investigating that route.
I'm glad you brought up the relays and LEDs. I have been wondering whether they are all functional. The panel itself was hanging down when I opened the cabinet first. 1 pair of the large relays move but I have yet to see the others budge.
This evening I will disconnect the board and test the relays directly. Do you think damage can be caused to drive circuitry if I power the coils directly with some external voltage? (Appropriate level of course!)
So my KCP switches seem fine:(
I did a multimeter test both directly on the switch inside the pendent and also on the pins of the plug.
Is it possible to use X11 43 and 44 to enable motors? They are labeled as external drives on, 1 and 0.
The saga continues..
I can see that KCP is well used and the key switch is moody. I need to go beyond T1 for T1 to activate.
I have also been stuck with not getting my little green 'I' which if I understand correctly will happen if the drives are enabled and the deadman is engaged while in T1.
If I hit 'drives off' I hear a gentle click of a small relay but there is no click or any sound when I press 'drives on'
Could this be my problem? A damaged cable of worn out switch?
Incidentally there are no strange error messages when I go into T1 mode.
Thanks again SkyeFire for sharing your knowledge!
This evening I will go through the start up procedure again and see what the last few messages are. I know I have not got to the stage of hearing the squeak of the motors engaging yet but the Deadman issue looks promising!
I will also reseat those ribbon cables into the relay board on the swing out bit. From my reading it seems they can shift and cause emergency like behavior
My giant paperweight may yet live!
Having never had the pleasure of squeezing a new deadman switch I wonder is (are) my Krc1 deadman switches worn.
There does not seem to be 3 positions!? Just in and out.
In T1 when I squeeze switch in and I have "-+" enabled (top left button) I do get my axis appear as option down the right side of the screen. However I'm getting an 'Active Commands Inhibited' notification.
The 3 position thing seems not there. Is it very subtle or click,click,click? Or am I just too ham fisted?
Success! I've got a clone working on the robot at last.
The final process was as follows:
I removed the original HDD from the cabinet and plugged it into an old desktop with i686 processor and IDE capability.
I put a new 160GB HDD on the slave plug on the ribbon cable. It is important that the capacity of the new HDD is the same or bigger than the original physical drive.
I then booted from the CD drive with Clonzilla i686 version on the disk.
I used the 'local disk to disk' option, carefully checking the names of the HDDs.
The rest was simple and worked perfectly following the on screen instructions.
On the install back into the cabinet I rewired the original CD as master HDD as slave but it failed to boot. I was gutted! Then I decided to remove the jumper which was on the 'cable select' option.
Reboot and BINGO!
Thank you all for your assistance on this matter. I'm sure I'll be back but for this evening I will plug in the power to the arm and see if it moves...
As of this evening I solved the Master/Slave mystery. It seems that the jumper on the HDD does indeed override the position on the IDE cable. I installed a jumper on the old drive and left it in the original position on the IDE cable and it is Auto-detected as master during boot.
I have started the Clonezilla route to make a copy of the original drive but this evening I found my old IDE desktop can't boot from USB so I will have to make a CDROM boot disk tomorrow and hope the CD rom drive is still functional. This is on a random desktop not the cabinet computer BTW.
Tomorrow is another day!
Hi Florida!
Thanks for your reply also.
Maybe the bios does not have 'find' the slave drive as it is defined under the USER parameters. I mean to say, during boot it reports looking for the Primary Master but there is no message regarding the slave, which it happily boots from. Would this sound correct?
I think I will stick a jumper on this mystery drive and see if it become a master in it's current position in the end of the IDE cable. At least this will clarify the primary master/slave question. It should get auto detected I assume.
I will also check the compatibility of my personal clone. It looks the same overtly but now I wonder if there a Format issue or some physical thing with the drive that WIN95 does not like. It is small and older so I assume this should not be an issue but we'll see.
Cheers!
Thank you both for your replies.
I've been away from the robot the last couple of days but will get back to poking around tomorrow.
@SkyFire, I suspect my system had been tweeked a bit and unfortunately none of the IDE cables were attached when I opened the swing out cabinet.
I think this will be a process of elimination..
The screen shot shows the configuration as I received it. This is the only way I can get it to boot at this moment.
And yes the (original) HDD is in the master (end) position on the IDE cable! The HDD has no jumpers so I suppose it is configured as slave.
Possibly importantly there is nothing else on the cable. Does this allow jumper to override the IDE cable position?
There is another IDE cable floating near the back of the CDROM floppy area. It is not plugged into either of those drives but it looks like it may have been. I didn't see where the motherboard end is. There must be another IDE header in there in the dark.
I must check to see if this HDD is FAT16. The physical disk is 160GB but it looks only like 1.99Gb when one views it in my computer via an IDE to USB adaptor.
I will check for and try other IDE cable to see if it changes the scenario.
It seems this 'User' setting is a manual set up method in the bios. Surly it could not be that the technician who installed this drive simply did not have a jumper and so set the Bios to boot from this USER defined fake 2GB drive???
Also I have two Sealed Lead Acids on the way. The ones in the cabinet were reading 1.1 V after 6hrs of the unit being powered. I assume they are defunct.
Thank you SKyFire. I will keep you posted.
