Send strings

Student · April 2017

Hi!

I want to generate from the UR10 a txt file with information about the different measures, for example:

Hole 702: OK
Hole 79: NOK (bad precision)
...

Is that possible? If not, which would be the best option? I understand that I need a script (Matlab, C, LabView...) with a TCP server to receive the information from the cobot and then generate the txt. But I have to send the strings one by one?

I mean, I want to do a complete cycle with the cobot (taking different measures) and generate a txt with the results.

Thanks!

matthewd92 · April 2017

We used to do this. Yes you need to send the strings separately. What we would do is send them in a background thread by raising a flag, setting a variable true for instance, at the end of the cycle. If the data send took longer than the time before I needed the variables again I would quickly assign them to another variable such as prev_hole_status. The other thing to remember is you cannot concatenate strings on the robot so you may need to send a key and then the value and handle putting it back together on the server. Also, we found having a slight delay between sends of 50-100 ms would keep them in the order that we sent. Otherwise sometimes they'll come in jumbled.

Student · April 2017

Thanks, @matthewd92 Solved. Finally I used LabView to receive and create a .txt file with all the strings sent by the cobot. Now I can receive multiple strings over TCP/IP and the function "socket_send_string" with the results of my measures.

matthewd92 · April 2017

You're welcome.

mariem_werfelli22 · April 2019

Hi!
I'm also using labview as server and UR10 as a client so my robot can send data to labview but i can't send data from labview to Robot so i hope that somebody give me a solution for that

matthewd92 · April 2019

Generally to send data you will have the robot request the data and then wait for the response from the server so something like this:

# Example of asking camera to trigger and send results
socket_send_string("trigger", "camera")
results = socket_read_string("camera") #has two second timeout by default, there are other methods for other data types such as float, binary integer, byte list, etc

You will need a handler on the server that when the request from the robot is made, what to respond back with

mariem_werfelli22 · April 2019

Hi Mathew,

can you give me an exemple from labview because i used the command " Socket_read_ascii_float(6)" to recieve data from server to client

matthewd92 · April 2019

I have never used Labview to control a robot so unfortunately I cannot give you that.

Tesfit · July 2021

@matthewd92
Hi Matthew,

I am using the UR10 socket communication to control thee motors by sending string (socket_send_string()) to to PC. This works great but the problem I am having is the every time I send a string I open and close the socket connection. Is there a way where I can avoid open and close connection every time I send string? I want to open the socket connection at the beginning of the program and close the socket at the end of program not every time when I send string.

example of my current code:

before Program

open=socket_open("IPaddress",port)

main program

socket_send_string("motor1:on")
close=socket.close()
open=socket_open("IPaddress",port)
socket_send_string("motor2:on")
close=socket.close()
open=socket_open("IPaddress",port)
socket_send_string("motor3:on")
close=socket.close()

Thank you in advance,
Tesfit

matthewd92 · July 2021

Just open it at the beginning, the third argument can be a port name as well which you can then use in your send and read commands to make sure they are using the correct port name.

Such as:

socket_open(“ip”, port, “name”)
socket_send_string(“message”, “name”)

as long as you are frequently accessing the port it should stay alive without issue. This is how we control motors as well with sockets.

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