doing robot operator training has it's moments... i have ripped weld torch off a robot (a few times) and even snapped an axis 5 motor by releasing the wrong brake .. not my fines moments, They were followed by "This is an example of what NOT to do.." and "do not use the PP to main button"...
like they say, if you haven't crashed a robot, you aren't working hard enough.
The thing we stress to operators is.. the robot is trying to hurt you. make it have a bad day by being safe.
Take a good look at the capacitors on the power supply. if they show any signs of leaking replace them and have the 6-pac refurbished. You may have to do the drives too.
Also check the contactors K43 and K42 (I believe) If they are older ones, it may be good to replace them and the external contacts. They control the incoming power
we had to add a Rc network for the touch sense to work on Fronius. It goes up in the wirefeeder as i recall. purchased from Fronius, part of the nozzle touch sense kit
Make sure your searches are in just one axis (x or y or z) and the function will update just that axis for the searches, and add them together as it goes through them. If more than one axis is changed with the search, it could be subtracting from one axis while adding to the next.
This happens from time to time on one of our robots, usually after the operator unsuccessfully tries to exit from an error handling routine. Shutting off the main power, and restarting usually brings it back up. If you have any external axis, they will have to be restarted (enabled) and usually you need to back up one step to restart the program. Mostly happens on large programs
Check the connections on the computer. there is a Rj45 connector that sometimes gets a bad connection on our robot, there is a led right next to it that should be green, if it turns red, it won't boot up and counts forever. Sometimes rebooting works too but i usually move the cable around a bit and it fires up (after rebooting of course)
We remove and check fans yearly, and clean out the housing under the fans. saves down time when the fans fail and burn up the drives
Thanks, I will give them a call.
We have an old XRC robot and have been using the Compact Flash card for program backups. recently it has not been able to hold the cF card in. Before I shut it down to mess with it, I'd like to take a good backup just in case... problem is, our alternate method was to use FDE software. This was back in the xp days when laptops had a printer port. The software needs to read a 'key' which plugs into the parallel port. New computers rarely have a serial port much less a printer port. Is ther some sort of an update to use a USB or a way to plug the XRC into a network? Just wondering what is out there.
