Is it possible to save programs using a network connections rather than the USB key

Sebastien 2017-07-28

Hi pros,
anyone know if it is possible to save programs on our plant network directly from the UR rather than saving on a USB stick? Could we also load the programs from the network?

matthewd92 2017-07-28

You could create a symbolic link within the programs folder to a different location on the corporate network. I do this with the simulator, created a symbolic link within programs that points to the shared file location between the Linux virtual machine and my Mac

Sebastien 2017-09-20

@matthewd92 do you know if it is possible to setup that symbolic link directly on the teach pendant? Or I guess we do this with the simulator and then transfer to the pendant afterwards?

matthewd92 2017-09-20

@Sebastien you can, you'd need a keyboard to enter the terminal of the robot but from there you can setup the symbolic link. Thats not something that would transfer from the simulator.

Sebastien 2017-09-26

@matthewd92 I see. I gave this a shot and I am not that good on Linux. I did map a folder that was in the simulators desktop to the programs folder of the UR simulator and it worked. However when trying to create a symbolic link that is pointing to something on the network I have a hard time. Do you need to 'mount' the network location first? If so what command line do you use to do this. I tried sudo mount but I get an access denied kind of error.

matthewd92 2017-09-27

@sebastien, not sure as I have never tried to do it. Our robots are not sitting on a traditional network. Maybe I will try with one of the ones in the lab when I am back in the office. Here is some information I found on how to mount a network drive on another computer to the Linux machine using Samba, which I am not sure is included in Debian which is the version of Linux UR uses. Also, if I recall the CB3 robots used a pretty old version of Debian, I have not looked lately to see what the newer machines are running.

Sebastien 2017-09-27

@matthewd92
sounds good. I will take a look at it and let you know if I find something that is working!

matthewd92 2017-09-27

Sounds good. Might be good to know when we are transferring programs from the simulator to production robots in the shop before deployment instead of using the trusty USB dongle

Sebastien 2017-09-28

@PierreOlivier_Proulx
have you done anything similar to this in the past? Saving programs on the network but being able to do so directly on the teach pendant of the UR?

PierreOlivier_Proulx 2017-09-28

I just tried to do it and I stumbled on a problem. The way I would have done it is to mount a samba share in the /programs directory with the command

mount -t cifs //<address>/<path> <mountpoint> -o username=<username>

However, mount is telling me the cifs filesystem type is not supported. I investigated a bit and I found that the kernel module cifs is required in order to mount a samba share. There is two solutions for this (I think). First ask UR to distribute this kernel module. Second, compile this kernel module and load it on the robot.

It could be a nice feature to package in a urcap.

You can look at this page for a reference.

Sebastien 2017-10-23

@PierreOlivier_Proulx
Same thing that I found. The information that I got from UR is that the linux platform is really minimal!