Posts by ancrof

Update for posterity

I managed to solve the issue by addressing a few problems :

1. The work visual documentation states you need between 4 and 256 bytes of IO to be transferred at once, therefore my 8 bits of IO were not enough to meet this requirement. This also needs to be echoed in TC3.

2. Check all etherCAT ports for foreign material and anything that can impair the connection. It appeared to me to be dropping my connection intermittently.

3. Refresh the IO drivers or restart the KRC4 anytime you update the IO in the PLC

Thanks for the help Panic

Sorry the screenshot is an older one by mistake here is the newest one. Yes as in the new screenshot you can see i mapped inputs to inputs

Hi Panic, thanks for taking the time to help. Sorry if some of my responses don't make sense I'm doing this for the first time and a little out of my field

a) hardware connection I am fairly sure is valid, not sure how to set a node address in WV but I think the module is ready to go

b) Note sure what you mean by node. As far as i understand the KRC4 will be the master as will the PLC and the EL6695 should bridge the two as two slaves transmitting data

c) not sure what to configure

d) dtm for the non Kuka EL6695 is added to the catalog

e) all the KRC4 will be talking to is the EL6695

f) tried to map IO but could not send any data through

Here is a run down of what exactly I did.
1. Connected hardware stack as shown in original post to KRC4 through X65.
2. Downloaded device description file of EL6695-secondary from Beckhoff and added to DTM catalouge
3. Connect to KRC4 with WV and added EL6695-secondary to the SYS-X44 bus structure
4. Went into slave settings for El6695-secondary and added 8 bits of data to both inputs and outputs
5. Mapped each of these IO bits to digital IO
6. Added corresponding IO of same size in TC3
7. Deployed project to KRC4
8. Activated my config on TC3
9. Restarted my KRC4
10. Tested by toggling IO from both the smartpad and TC3 to no avail

Thanks again

Hey everyone,
I'm trying to send IO between my Twincat3 PLC and my KRC4 compact. I'm running Workvisual 3.1.

I have my KRC4 connect from X65 to the X1 ethercat input on the EL6695-0002 and my softPLC (running on my PC) is connected to an EK1101
PC ==> EK1101 ==> EL1008 ==> EL2008 ==> EL7342 ==> EL6695-0001/EL6695-0002 ==>KRC4

I've created a byte of information for both input and output on the EL6695-0002 through the slave settings of the EL6695 in workvisual. However I don't exactly know how to map this byte to any IO?

In addition, I tried creating 8 bits of IO and mapping that to the digital IO (which works) however this method doesn't seem to be able to send information to the PLC. No errors pop up but IO i have created that is mapped to the digital IO on the KRC4 dont seem to react to or affect the 8 bits of I and O I have created on the Twincat 3 PLC.

So my questions are,
1.How do i properly send IO between the KRC4 and the PLC, is there some special configuration I'm required to do but am missing?
2.How do I map digital IO to edit a shared byte of info on the EL6695-0002

Any help is appreciated thanks

Hi guys,

I'm running TC 3.1.4022.4 on a PC running Windows 10. Trying to send information between the KRC4 and the PC through this configuration:

PC ==> EK1101 ==> EL1008 ==> EL2008 ==> EL7342 ==> EL6695-0001/EL6695-0002 ==>KRC4

I have got the EL6695-0002 in the SYS-X44 bus structure on workvisual and deployed that onto the project. In TC3 I have EL6695 in the IO devices. From here I'm a little lost. I went into the slave settings
in WV for the EL6695 and added 8 bits of input and output to try and map but I'm at a loss on how to link an IO i have added in TC3 to the IO on WV. I have seen the few other threads on here about this topic but they don't specifically answer this question.

So my question is how do I link up an output from my PLC to EL6695 primary to transfer into an input into EL6695 secondary to an input into the KRC4?
Attached are screenshots of my WV and TC3 screens and the physical module setup.

Thanks for any help Sorry if i have missed vital information.

Hi Guys,

So I'm running TwinCAT 3.1.4022 on a Windows 10 64bit PC. Attached are photos of my solution setup, the error i get when trying to jog the axis online, and the hardware setup (Note i know the EL6695 isnt powered but I assume it isnt affecting the operation of the EL7342). The PC is connected to the EK1101 via EtherCAT and the EL6695 is connected to my KRC4 Compact.

So the warning LED's are on in the EL7342 but I'm not sure what they are exactly referring to, the Beckhoff website says it could be "Motor power supply not connected"
or "80 °C temperature exceeded" both of which i believe are false. Not sure how to rectify this.

The error code in the Online jogging tab is quoted as:

"Following error monitoring (position)" With active following error monitoring (position) a following error exceedance has occurred, whose magnitude is greater than the following error window, and whose duration is longer than the parameterized following error filter time."

I'm fairly new to PLC control and Robotics in general so this is a bit above my head. I know though that the motor isnt moving when I try to jog and that the error is relating to the fact that the actual position is lagging behind the predicted position more than the allowed amount. I attempted to run the program with lag monitoring off and while i could jog without encountering the error the motor was still not moving.

Is there anything I'm missing?

Thanks for the help

Hi Guys,

So I'm running TwinCAT 3.1.4022 on a Windows 10 64bit PC. Attached are photos of my solution setup, the error i get when trying to jog the axis online, and the hardware setup (Note i know the EL6695 isnt powered but I assume it isnt affecting the operation of the EL7342). The PC is connected to the EK1101 via EtherCAT and the EL6695 is connected to my KRC4 Compact.

So the warning LED's are on in the EL7342 but I'm not sure what they are exactly referring to, the Beckhoff website says it could be "Motor power supply not connected"
or "80 °C temperature exceeded" both of which i believe are false. Not sure how to rectify this.

The error code in the Online jogging tab is quoted as:

"Following error monitoring (position)" With active following error monitoring (position) a following error exceedance has occurred, whose magnitude is greater than the following error window, and whose duration is longer than the parameterized following error filter time."

I'm fairly new to PLC control and Robotics in general so this is a bit above my head. I know though that the motor isnt moving when I try to jog and that the error is relating to the fact that the actual position is lagging behind the predicted position more than the allowed amount. I attempted to run the program with lag monitoring off and while i could jog without encountering the error the motor was still not moving.

Is there anything I'm missing?

Thanks for the help

Follow up, we used a multimeter to test the voltage coming from x%% and we recorded a 0.5V. The documentation quotes x55 as 24V. Whats going on?

Thanks for replying Panic,

We have read the documentation just couldn't really find our problem.
How would we go about powering the 2 (+) and 2 (-) terminals on the coupler? Our x55 only has 7/8 pinned. Should we install our own?

Hi everyone,

I'm running a KR3 Agilus R540 off a KRC4 compact with KSS V8.3.20. We have purchased a EK1101 bus coupler with an EL1008 and EL2008 I/O modules. Upon connecting the bus coupler to x65 and powering it by jumping pin 7/8 in x55 we get no response from the bus coupler, no LED's turn on which i believe they should. We tried reversing the order of pin 7/8 connected to the EK1101 to no effect. We checked the 24v to 0v terminals on the EK1101 to see if they were conducting and don't seem to be. Can anyone offer some advice in this situation?
Pretty new to robotics so forgive me if this is a naive question.

Thanks a lot

Quote from linuxsand

Code

+---------------------------+                       +-------------------------------------------+
  |                           |                       |                                           |
  |                           |                       |    External PC                            |
  |         KRC4              |                       |                                           |
  |                           | +-------------------> |  1  KicVarGateway client (py_openshowvar) |
  |                           |                       |  2  Your Python script                    |
  |  KicVarGateway installed  | <-------------------+ |                                           |
  |                           |                       |                                           |
  |                           |                       |                                           |
  +---------------------------+                       +-------------------------------------------+


   `TRIGGER WHEN PATH` set $OUT[X]                     client polls $OUT[X], detects from false to true
                                                       run your own script

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This is really great thanks! Last bit, what are the connections between krc4 and the pc?

Quote from panic mode

One rather crude workaround (that does not require access to variables) is to have KRL generate small file. External program could monitor for file presence and do some action (and delete file).

How would i go about getting KRL to write this file?

That seems like it could work but the software limitations say "KicVarGateway could not be used in real-time applications". Should I take this to mean that i could not operate and pull variables from the KRC4 while its moving? I need to activate motors at a certain step in the robots path.

Hello!
I'm extremely new to robotics and am now working with a KR3 Agilus R540 off a KRC4 compact with KSS V8.3.20.
I'm slowly working through simple guides and will undergo some training soon from KUKA themselves. I was just wondering however whether it is possible to, through KRL or WorkVisual (or infact any other method), trigger a python script to communicate with some external devices acting on the work project. For example triggering a script on a PC (or maybe the KRC4?) that will run small external motors turning knobs and actuators pulling levers.

Is this a stupid question or is there a workaround? Sorry if this is doesn't make sense or is a naive question.
Thanks alot