Overview of the Robo Cylinder® Software for IAI Servo Press Product

Hello this is Ray Marquiss, Senior Application Engineer with Valin Corporation and this video is just going to be an overview of the Robo Cylinder software that is used with Intelligent Actuator Servo Press product.

To get to the software will just click on the start menu and then you can scroll down to IAI. I didn't go through installing the software in this video. You’ll click on the PC interface software for the RC and EC products. Then it will go through a status check to find out if you're connected. And then this screen will pop up that asks you which operation mode you want the Robo Cylinder control to operate in, and your choices are to be in one of two teach modes or one of two monitor modes. In teach mode you can actually change what's happening. You can jog and initiate moves from the Robo Cylinder.  In the monitor mode you can only monitor what's going on and see what the status of IO and positioning and all that is. I always prefer with the Robo Cylinder, since it's a small product in this case, to go with this safety speed invalidity, which means that there's no clamp on the speed that you can move at during the teaching or programming.  The IO start prohibition just means that the IO that you would normally use to control the Robo Cylinder or servo press will not work.

I'll click on OK. And then over here on the left is your tree view. If I click on this plus sign here, you'll see that there is a program entry, a parameter entry in an operation entry. The first thing that I like to do is start the operation monitoring tool. You'll be given this message. And after you've seen it a few times, you can click on “do not display this warning from the next time”. It's basically telling you that you're going to be controlling the servo press from here, and to be careful. This is the interface for monitoring and doing some preliminary control of the servo press. This is not meant to be used as an interface for operating the servo press in an in a manufacturing environment. It's just for testing and configuration.

Whenever anybody gets a new little toy like a servo press or a robot, they like to make sure to see it move right away so it's easy to do. If we just click on the servo button that does the servo on. And then when we click on the home button, it will actually cause the actuator find its home position. If we try to move without doing the home first, or try to go to positions, then it will give us an error. I know this is a little confusing when you look at it at first, but it gets clearer in a hurry once you start using it.  So there's a tab that you can barely see here. This means we're in program operations, so I can go here and select a program to operate: which program do I want to run? If I click on the plus sign over here, I can see these programs and the comments that are associated with them.  Whenever you see this icon that looks like a little notepad or note paper, that means that there is some programming done under that program. If it's blank, like this one, that means that there's no programming in there. So just because there's no name here doesn't mean that there's not some programming info there. We'll get to that stuff in a little bit.

The other option under the program operation here is you have the ability to select the program, and this gives you an outline of the steps. Let me let me just pick one to put in there. I believe that my program number 23 is good, so I'll go here to select number 23. And then during this probing step - they called a probing step here - it's the search step here, so I could have it stop after it has probed the proper distance and so I have these options to turn on and start the program to run differently than it normally would.  I have monitors here to tell me whether it passed for the position of the program or the load of the position. If it did both of those, then it's a comprehensive pass. If it fails, it will generate an alarm that we’ll see. I also can see the status of the inputs and outputs.  We’ll see those change. For instance, if I started moving, you'd see some of these change. If you have the IO connected, you can see the status of your inputs here as you're turning them on and off and you can see the status of the outputs as the controller turns those on and off automatically.

The next tab, the trial operation tab, and it's pretty subtle; you don't see a lot change, but watch this area here. And you can see that it does change a bit. So now I can jog at this speed. Or I could command it to go to this position at this speed. And then down here is the monitoring of the status of the controller, so you can see the location, the speed, the current feedback load, the calibration which is part of the configuration in the beginning, the overload level, all that stuff. So for instance, if I jog forward, you can see this data change. And now I've run into a spring that I have here. You'll see that in future videos, but I've run into a spring that I have underneath the servo cylinder or the servo press and it's feeding back 46 newtons into the sensor that's that's installed there. If I want to go back to the zero position, let's say this is 65 right here. So if I want to go back to zero position, I can enter 0 here and push play and it'll go back to 0. If I want to go back and test that position again, I could say I want to go to 65 millimeters hit play. And it's going to go back to 65 meters millimeters and about 46 newtons feedback.

There's also this IO test window here.  It gives you a warning [when you click on it] that once you go to this, it's going to turn off all the outputs, but I can go in here and try to force on outputs to test them with my external devices to make sure the external devices are reading them correctly. The next thing that we look at is the programming. And over here are our programs. If I double click on the program, it opens it up. This is the data that's in the controller right now. They keep this window small because there's some other info that you don't always use, but I like to expand it and so there's this display switch button here that lets you expand out and you can see some other stuff that we’ll look at later when we actually start getting into programming, but you can tell that this is fill in the blanks. I just enter in all the data for each part of my motion profile: the approach, the search, the press, then the judgment, then the depress, which means the release it's “depressing” or anti-pressing; it's kind of a translation thing. And then they return to the original origin spot. You can see these checkboxes here. That means that I might want to make a program that only has the approach, or it only has the press, and so I would uncheck these and just leave the press motion there and then it will do it.  We’ll get into the programming in another video, so we'll be able to go through and explain all of these fields and watch them in operation.

The last thing I want to show on this screen is the program comment button up here. You have to look for these, but basically the program comment allows you to enter a comment that will show up in this field over here. So this, as you can see, is our “M1 keeping position until 80 millimeters” and that corresponds with this program 23 that I opened over here.

The last little bit that we want to talk about here is for saving.  When you're working on a program, you can click on this icon here, and that will save it to your computer just like any other normal saving from any computer we've used in the last 20 years 30 years, so you'll go here and browse to where you want, then give it a name and do it. It's advisable to put the program number that you want to store this in if you ever have to recall it. So for instance, this is my program number 23, so I might just add 23 to the beginning of the name so that it tells me when I have to recall this program, where I will put it in the list of programs and you can see over here that we can have up to 63 programs. If you want to save, make changes and then save them to the controller. If I change this to like 9 for instance, you see that it's turned red because now it's different from what's in the controller. And so to save that to the controller, I say “load to controller” with this icon here by clicking on it. If I want to read back what's in the controller, I click on this lightning bolt. And it will give me a warning saying, “hey, this data’s different than what's in the controller, are you sure?” So let's say yes and then you see it went back to 10. So the little square says load the controller. The little lightning Bolt says read from controller basically.

So that's it for this video. That's a very short overview of the Robo Cylinder software from intelligent actuator. If you have any questions you can reach us using the information above. Thank you very much. See in the next video.

If you have questions you can reach us at the link on the screen or you can call Valin at (855) 737-4716 or fill out our online form.