Why did the controller lose the programs and parameters after Christmas shutdown?

kckku

The controller wouldn't startup on its own after the Christmas shutdown. I got a message on the Flexpendant that says the controller didn't shut down correctly. During the previous shutdown (can't remember when), the controller failed to correctly save this system data.

I had to restore the controller using a backup from before Christmas. Everything worked as is after this. The station and robot were able to home and start production.

I don't know why this happened or what I didn't do before going for Christmas vacation. I added the Flexpendant hotswap option before and maybe this had something to do with this? Otherwise, no changes were made to the controller.

revans

Here are a couple of explanations, but without testing it is hard to say.

• The "battery" inside of the controller could be going bad. It is actually a bank of capacitors, but they do occasionally go bad. Then anytime you shut down the robot, it won't have time to save everything from memory to storage, and it will give you the warning you saw.
• Sometimes when making large changes to the robot, there is some memory that has not been fully cleared and the robot pendant will freeze up and it will fault out in the manner you saw. Very uncommon.

If it is continuely doing this, look into the ultra capacitor issues. They sell them in a little black molded case, so there isn't any soldering, it is just unplugging the old one and plugging the new one in for the most part. To avoid the issue in the mean time, make sure to shut down the robot using the restart menu and hitting shutdown main computer. After it shuts down, then you can flip the power switch.