Posts by fastfingers

Ok. Are you able to repeat the failure with the original settings and use 'show almost found'? This can be really helpful to show what is wrong.

The scale limits are 97-102 and the score is 98.5. I'm not sure how much experience you have but remember that scale and score are two different things. If you open the scale limits and it passes, scale should be the issue. What scale value was returned when the process failed? It must have been between 97 and 98. You can use the 'show almost found' checkbox to help diagnose the problem. Hope this helps.

Sweet! Thanks for keeping us updated. I will try this out soon.

Do you have an iRVision image of a part with holes that you can share? You can probably use one of the inspection tools to monitor how many light vs dark pixels are in an image if there happens to be a significant difference between the holes and a solid part.

If you want help setting this up in Roboguide, open the help menu within Robouide and search the topics there. You will find some very helpful tutorials that walk you through almost any possible cell setup. Search the term 'sample' and you should be successful.

I use flags pretty much the same way you do and I agree they help clean things up. It make sense, especially if there's no need to communicate the status externally to a PLC.

Personally I like PRs but I think Ps are safer (more difficult to modify by someone not familiar with TP programming ie operator).

Position registers have many desirable qualities, but they also have some quirks. Pos registers can be modified within the controller at any time and can cause programmed motion to pause for a short time when the controller checks to make sure nothing new is being written to that register before moving to it. There's probably a better technical definition of this phenomenon and I don't have time to look it up.

You can write a line of code to change the value of your tool while retaining all of your other frame info:
Store the values for tool 1 and tool 4 in PRs [1] and [4], respectively.
Utool 1=PR[1] for using the coordinates for your current tool 1
Utool 1=PR[4] for using the coordinates for tool 4

Run one line of code or the other to overwrite the tool frame as needed.

My thought is that if someone is going to make changes, they will, whether it's a point, position or numeric register or anything else.

Yes, you can switch tools wit the same program only if you use PRs.

Yes, the point of tool frames is so you can switch tool frames as the EOAT changes, however, some planning up front helps to make everything work smoothly.

How many points are in the original program? If there are alot of points, it wight be easier to simply write new values (from the new tool) into your current tool frame.

Programmed points are Utool and Uframe sensitive. You can do one of two things (without getting too deep):
Use position registers with the new tool frame. Position registers are global and will run with any frames you choose. You will need to verify that you will get the results you're after with positioning of the tool and part, etc.
You can also make a new program that uses the new tool with programmed points. You can transform the current program and have it use the new tool frame with the old points. The tool offset utility is in the utilities menu.

You can also copy the program and touch up each point one by one with the new tool frame active. This can be daunting...

What model robot is this? I am dealing with a similar issue (trying to power up the cameras) and was told that POE isn't an option. I found some 5m cables to plug into the power ports on the cameras and will run 12VDC up the arm through the Asi1 and Asi2 connectors to power the cameras.

If you have an 'all of the above' backup, you can load frame values from before things changed and see if things improve. If the tool frame values changed and you load the correct values, you should be back in business as if nothing happened. If you have Roboguide or a .VA version of the frame data, you can compare previous frame values to the current values without going through the trouble of loading the files.

Oh...

Quote from pdl

If you package it as a compressed cell, you will wind up with a single .rgx file. All you have to do is double click it and it will open automatically in roboguide. Compressing the package can shrink it by up to 90% if you have a lot of complex cad parts.

This is good to know. I have a cell that is really bogging my machine down and I will try this. Thank you.

I think transforming from the zero frames is supported....

UPDATE: You can transform from the zero frames.

Fanuc has utilities to do exactly what you're looking to do. MENU>UTILITIES>TOOL OFFSET *OR* FRAME OFFSET
I'm not sure which controller version first had them but they have been around for quite a while.

Read up on these in the Fanuc documentation. Tool offset will shift the program relative to a new tool frame and frame offset will shift the program relative to a new user frame. You also have the choice of keeping the robot position where it was before the transform or having the robot follow the new frame. One thing to note is these utilities don't work well with position registers so make sure you program has all programmed points.

Pull the whole packaged folder from the USB and put it on the hard drive of the PC on which you'd like to open the cell. Browse to the packaged folder with file explorer and open the file with the .frw extension. You can't miss it, it has a yellow robot icon in front of the file name. Another way to open a packaged cell for the first time is to start Roboguide, FILE>OPEN CELL>browse to the packaged folder on your hard drive and find the .frw file and open it.

You are likely jogging using the USER coordinate system. If you switch to WORLD, the robot should move the way you are expecting it to. You can toggle through jog modes using the COORD key on the pendant. USER frames define how the robot moves in USER coordinates while the WORLD frame cannot be changed. You will find a lot of helpful information on this topic in the Fanuc documentation.

Use the package cell function.
FILE>PACKAGE CELL>CELL"cell name here"
You will be prompted for a location for saving (USB in your case). The packaged cell will contain everything, including CAD files, to recreate the cell on another computer.

Please keep us updated on any progress you make getting the values with Karel. I'm interested to hear if it works.