Fanuc Robot & Festo CPX FB36 modular manifold

Dominator_JZX

Member
Join Date
Apr 2020
Location
Ireland
Posts
2
Hi all,


First post on here.
I'm an automation engineer and I have plenty of experience with Allen Bradley, Siemens and Fanuc etc.
Constantly building automation cells and assembly projects in-house for the company I work for.


Anyways it has been put to me restore a pre-existing automation cell and install a Fanuc robot in place of a much older Abb robot (which is starting to give lots of trouble) to do some simple pick and place tasks with stainless steel product.
The robot I'm going to be using is a new Fanuc M-10iD12 with ethernet IP comms. I want to couple this with a Festo CPX FB-36 module to control all of the I/O and pneumatics side of things.
Generally speaking from a control point of view I would always use an AB PLC as the master and use the Fanuc robot and Festo module as slaves. But this time round my boss wants me to try use the robot as the master and the Festo module as the slave to cut some small costs and time spent programming. I can't see this working out well from a control and comms point of view and neither Fanuc or Festo could give me straight answer as to whether it would even work or not.
Can anyone shine any light on this before I begin the project in the next couple of weeks?


Thanks,


D
 
Caveats up front


I am on a bit of a philosophical bent today. I have no knowledge of the details of what you are talking about, and Iadmit that someone with experience might be able to say "I tried that and can confidently say that it will never work."


With that out of the way:



Summary


It may be worth doing even if you suspect it will not work, because you might learn something that outweighs the potential wrong-ness. It's a risk to be sure, so until it's done you won't know if it was a good idea or not.



Detail


Two steps forward and one back is not always a bad thing. As engineers/technical persons we are trained to die a little bit when we hear, and especially when we say, that, but the step back is where we learn, and we don't get to that step back without the (wrong) two forward.



My Dad told me once he was on a job performance testing large steam turbines, and something was not right, the numbers did not add up. They were trying to deduce, from what data they had, where the problem was (typically a bad measurement device). So it's late and they've been at it probably a dozen and a half hourse, getting nowhere, and his colleague says "Let's do something, even if it's wrong."




Maybe what your boss is suggesting will not work as you suspect, but in exploring that you will find a third way that is better than the other two; or maybe this is not the project to go to the far field picking buttercups. Ultimately it's your choice.




That's the summary; here is a blog post that says it better: https://valarinconsulting.com/blog/value-and-learning-how-to-prioritize
 
I've never used the Festo CPX FB-36 with a Fanuc robot, but I have used other valves and I/O blocks controlled by Fanuc robots. It should work with the Festo unit fine.

Make sure you have the Ethernet/IP Scanner/Adapter option installed on the robot.

The communications is set up similar to a Generic Ethernet Module in an AB PLC. After the communications is setup, the I/O Mapping is similar to what you may have setup previously for Robot to PLC communications.

The only other thing to keep in mind is that programming becomes needs more options installed if you need to monitor inputs control outputs independent of the robot line by line program when the robot is the communication master. If all of your inputs and outputs are on the robot tooling you should be fine.
 
I have used the festo CPX on a kuka robot.
It worked. But it also had a beckhoff plc inside the robot which is what i hooked the ethercat from the CPX to.
Festo did give me some EDS sheets. But i do not know if they did anything for me. It was almost the same situation, neither company could give me a straight answer. With a little help from kuka applications we got it sorted out.
The problem with fanuc is they dont have an integration support team like yaskawa and kuka. As far as i know. Most of the time if i have an issue with fanuc integration stuff im on my own, kinda irritating.

So i think in fanuc it would be different.
I have never used the fanuc robot as a master. Only as adapters.
 

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