About Me >.< | Projects x.x | Club :3 | git - spagetti code, served cold | Mastodon - Shitposts, but short | Matrix (for some reason) | Send me an Email :3
Cool hardware is ofter too expensive. This is especially true when it comes to industrial robotics. Still it seems like every Hackerspace has at least one member with some old Industrial Robot. In the Case of the CCCAC there are (at least) three. And one of them is me.
But I did not have the money to justify buying a four figure robot. Instead I got lucky, and someone had salvaged, presumably from his Work. With a broken Controller from '95, it was passed onto me, when he couldn't figure out the problem.
Now, I didn't find the problem on my own either. But with lots of help, we found out that the slow-start relais was broken. So it was always running in series with the big current limiting resistor. That of course got hot. And thanks to some good engineering tripped a thermal fuse.
After replacing that fuse and relais, the controller bootet right back up. However, the RS-232 interface that should be usable for commanding the movement, refused to offer the shell it was supposed to. The teach pendant however worked.
Some frustation later, I decided to, instead of figuring out a way to fix the console, reverse engineer the teach pendant, to achieve motion control over a moder PC like that. And about two days of building sketchy adapters and probing pins with an oscilloscope, (and again a lot of help by other people) the pinout was reversed and the teach pendant emulated.
Since then the sketchy adapters were replaced with a nice 3D-Printed Box, with an E-Stop and an RS-232 port. Next steps will probably be reading out the flash in the controller, and trying to reverse the soft-/firmware a bit, in the hopes of finding out why the other port didn't work.