IRB6400 Milling with S4C controller, limited memory problem.

bribro12

Hello all,

First of all thank you very much already to the people on this forum for the help on getting my IRB6400 robot resurrect from the dead.

I'm now able to create, load and save programs on the S4C controller with the help of the teach pendant, but would now like to use the robot for milling/3D-printing applications.

I managed to successfully generate compatible RAPID code for the IRB6400 with the post processor in Autodesk Fusion 360 and I'm able to load this code onto the S4C controller and run the program but only if it's size is smaller than the size of a floppy, or 1.44Mb to be exact. So I can only run very small (almost unusable) cnc-programs due to the memory limit on the S4C controller.

I've read that it's possible to connect the S4C directly to a PC and transfer positioning data directly from the PC to the S4C controller through RS232. But for this to work an option "Factory Ware Interface" should be installed on the controller. I have this option but need to install it.

I have a trial version of RobotStudio 4.0 running on a windows XP virtual machine and tried to load the larger RAPID programs (10+ Mb) in here in order to try and send it directly to the S4C controller via RS232 with the help of the "Factory Ware Interface".But it's not even possible to import these larger programs. I get the error that the files size is to large.

So my question is: is there a way to run these larger files on the S4C controller, maybe through direct communication with a PC?

Thanks in advance for your time and expertise.

Kind regards,
Brian

bribro12

In case anyone is interested, I found a way to send coordinates directly to the S4C controller through serial communication. I build a small application (Rapid2Serial) where you can import the rapid file you want the robot to execute and send it line by line over serial. On the S4C controller itself runs a small plugin program (FULTST09) that communicates with the program on the PC. Video can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64rQNqK_6PE&t=1s

More information about the application can be found on my website: https://bbprojects.technology/collections/software/products/rapid2serial-program