Fanuc Robot R-J2 M410iW PalletTool CPU Recovery

OkiePC

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Mar 2005
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I spent the last four days reviving a dead robot after its CPU took a dump and our backups were found to be both missing pieces and flawed, in addition to being out of date. It was more than I wanted to learn in a down situation, and I was unable to restore the R-J2 controller without the help of PalletTool expert field tech from Fanuc.

I have as of today implemented a new backup procedure and policy to ensure I don't get caught holding the bag like that again.

Now I have a whole host of questions I want to record while they're still fresh in my overloaded brain...

SRAM PMCIA cards: My controller, running PalletTool V4.21-2A, would not read a panasonic SRAM card with files that were copied from another card via laptop ports. After the machine was functional again, we shut it down to make a controller backup on SRAM, only to find that one of our cards was reportedly not format (according to the teach pendant message). So, we used FANUC engineer's SRAM card and then tried to copy the files to my card using laptop PMCIA ports. The copied card was not recognized and reported as unformatted.

Is there a way to create a controller backup on SRAM that can further be copied to CD-ROM or other durable media, and then returned to the SRAM card in a format acceptable to my robot?

Also, if anyone knows how long the battery in a typical 2MB SRAM card should last...

K-FLOPPY: We are planning to purchase this software to replace our dated 720K "Fanuc Toaster" floppy drive. It took about 4 hours to load the system software with that thing, and because my alleged software program files were incorrect and incomplete, I had to repeat that installation four times in order to have a clean install before the field tech bailed me out yesterday. I watched the field tech use KFLOPPY on his laptop with a serial connection to the R-J2 UOP serial port. The software looked a little buggy, but seemed to function okay and was considerably faster than the toaster drive. Fanuc phone tech support said KFLOPPY is about $300, or the same as about 15 minutes of Robot downtime in this application. Comments on KFLOPPY to RJ2 experiences are appreciated...

A third potential means of CPU backup and quick restore is to keep a spare CPU with battery instaled sitting on the shelf ready to go. I am thinking of taking it one step further and setting up a CPU test bench with a spare PS card and the bare minimum other hardware required to safely communicate with it in the offline office environment for the purpose of maintaining and testing backups and having a readily available plug and play controller. Has anyone any experiece with this method of restoring?

In general any comments on the R-J2, PalletTool, PalletTool PC Offline, are desired....

Thanks...
Paul
 
Fanuc robotics gave me Kfloppy for free and I just use my laptop and a serial cable to backup my RJ-2. I have done multiple reinstalls with Kfloppy and never had any problems. It is DOS based so the hardest thing is to navigate through the file structure. Fanuc had me FTP to there site in order to download it. Also you can obtain it by getting a demo of WINolpc I believe. The cable is a standard RS232 cable, i cannot remember if it is a null modem or not. I think it is because anytime I use Procomm plus to download from Fanuc CNC controls I have to stick a null modem dongle in line with the cable. Hope this helps some. The offline programming is nice just because it gets a little time consuming typing in comments on the teach pendant.
 
Fanuc PalletTool, Anyone?

Alright, now I am way past that catastrophe, but I wanted to bump this thread to see if there are any other PalletTool users out there with Fanuc M410 or similar robots.

We now have fresh memory cards and batteries for the RJ-2. I am the designated robot programmer and have the PMs too.

I have, since our big failure, made numerous unit load additions, retaught PalletTool positions, edited TP programs, and altered the PLC RIO interface a little, using a few bits for things I needed to handle our newest products.

I have a lot of knowledge now, but still believe I am only half way to mastery of these things.

I am using PalletTool PC with KFloppy to program all three of ours.

My most important area of ignorance has to do with mulitple pallet stations and how the robot path is affected when it is placing units on one station, but must avoid the adjacent ones.

I have been playing 3D Tetris with boxes of sausage in a cold room about 40 degrees for the past two weeks almost non-stop.

It is a lot of fun, but nothing like PLC programming, since most of the nuts and bolts appear to be buried in Karel programs, at least in our oldest robot.

Did I tell you we have 3? One R-J2, one RJ-3b with color teach pendant, and in sausage an older RJ3.

Any other users out there feel free to interact or add to this. I did not have much luck finding active Fanuc forums, so if you know of one, please reply.

Thanks,
Paul
 
Last edited:
Thanks, Jim.

I don't know why google did not take me there, or maybe it did, and my searching method there was wrong.

Lots of promising info already...

Paul
 
My 2 cents

It has been a while, but this is what I remember:



  • The communication cable is unique. Call Fanuc for the Pinout (they will give it to you) or buy one for $395 like my plant manager did.
  • The newer PCMCIA cards will not even fit in the slot on the older RJ2 controllers, but I think on the newer RJ? Controllers will fit with the latest cards.
  • I have, don’t remember how now, used kfloppy to link between controller and pc to back up even older RJ controllers.
  • Teach pendant programming worked better for me than pallettool PC become proficient and there is no need for a computer.
  • To teach multiple pallet or infeed stations there is a jig plate and pointer used to define the gripper position, orientation, and traverse.
  • The new Pallettool Pro looks much better than the older version, but at the time would not work with the older RJ2s


A good point of contact if you can get to him is DC Washington. He was my pallettool instructor some time back. He works at the Fanuc home base in Michigan.



Sorry I have been out of the robot game for some time now.



Good luck.
 

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