Wire Count through IRC 5 / S4 Controller

jfeckla

I am trying to write code to count how much welding wire we use both on a per part basis and also on a per run basis.  Our Miller AutoAcxess does this for us, but to see it we need a palm pilot and special software.  Since we have multiple robots, this does not seem practical to do.  <?:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

All of the relevant information is in our S4C and IRC 5 controls including wire feed and I think I can get it to count seconds while welding so a calculation can be made.  The goal here would be to get an accurate count of inches or mm used.

Any suggestions?

Thank you in advance

 

RussD

Depending how you want to retrieve the data and how the robot is equipped, there are several ways that you could proceed.

You could write the data to a text file and retrieve it from the robot or via ftp, or you could create a PC application that writes the value into a database, or you could calculate and write the value to a group output to a PLC periodically, etc.

There are numerous possibilities, if you could describe in more detail how you want to report/access the data, someone can advise possible approaches.

jfeckla

What would really be nice is to have the values on the production screen that contains the part count.  I want the operators to be able to find it easily and if it were on that screen, they would be in it anyway to record the number of parts that they had done. 

RussD

You should be able to do this very simply with TPWrites, especially if you minimize the other messages that you may write to the screen. You can perform the calculations as you described and store them in RAPID variables, and then call a routine that updates the production window after each part is produced. This at least would be portable across both S4 and IRC5. IRC5 offers many more alternatives to create user interfaces, but they are not portable to S4.