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Home > Integration > 2-finger gripper control from 2 Digital IO
Mathew_Garcia

Hello,

I'm looking for help on how to set up a PC that will take 2 digital signals to control my 2-Finger gripper. I would like to use a stand alone PC(windows 7) with digital IO, then run software to handshake and to convert the digital signal 0 to open the gripper, and digital signal 1 to close the gripper to the required Modbus RTU signal over USB to the gripper. I'm wondering if anyone has done this in the past and can recommend the PC software to run digital Inputs and translate this to Modbus RTU signals to open and close the Robotiq 2-finger gripper?

Thank you in advance for your support,
Etienne_Samson

@Mathew_Garcia Thanks for posting and welcome to DOF !

I can help you on the Gripper side and provide you all the information to communicate from your PC to the Gripper, but unfortunately I have little to say on the digital input side.

To communicate with the Gripper you should know that it's by default a Modbus RTU Slave unit (all our grippers are). It will have 16 registers of 8 bit (16 bytes of 8 bits).

Hardware setup : Power the Gripper to your supply and use the RS-485 to USB converter. zoom

Communication setup : Check section 4.7.1 of the instruction manual, you have all the Modbus RTU  & COM port config.

Communicating : I would recommend you to visit simplymodbus.ca, you can download a Master emulator to communicate with the Gripper. Know that we support function function 03 (single read) function 16 (mutliple write) and function 23 (multiple read and write). The registers of the Gripper in which you must write & read are explained in the manual also, 4.3 will explain you the robot output (where you write) and 4.4 will explain you the the robot input (where you read).

How to test : In short, try to write 1 in the first bit (0) of the first byte (0), it will activate the Gripper (it will do it's activation routine, open and close).

When this works, you need a program to do a:
If digital IO is 1 --> send open command

Or whatever you want to accomplish.

You can find Modbus Libraries on Google for almost everything, C, Python, etc.

Samuel_Bouchard

Hi @Mathew_Garcia, glad to see you here! Is the information public on when the software interface to connect external tooling will be available on the Sawyer?
Samuel_Bouchard