Since the UR5 already has a connection at its toolhead with I/O and supply connections, it would be a lot neater to connect the gripper there instead of having to route a cable all the way back and fix it with zipties. Is there a way to do that, or does the gripper have to be controlled through the USB port?

@mareszko if you are talking about the Robotiq 2-Finger Gripper it cannot be attached to the tool connector. Two reasons, first there is not enough power, it's a maximum of 0.6 A instead of 1A inside the controller. Second one is that there is not industrial communication, we use Modbus RTU over serial (USB) to communicate and the tool connector only has digital IO.

Alright, thanks for your answer.