quinta-feira, 28 de novembro de 2024

Does Yaskawa Job Editor still exist?

 

YRC1000 Job Editor in Standard Mode

(Você pode ler este post em português aqui)

I don't think so, but it doesn't hurt to ask.

As far as I know, the Job Editor is no longer in development, and it's probably no longer sold. It hasn't been listed on the Yaskawa website for a long time, and the most recent manual is from 2017.

UPDATE: I checked the Yaskawa websites today, looking for other information, and on the Yaskawa Europe website, I came across the Job Editor in the software section. Until recently, it was no longer there. On the other hand, on the Motoman.com website, there is no list of it.

This may be because most of its functions have been absorbed by other Yaskawa products, which seems to be moving in the direction of other manufacturers who have adopted the "all-in-one" philosophy. One example is the JobPad in MotoSim, which we've already discussed here.

If I remember correctly, the Job Editor has been available since the MRC controllers, that is, in the mid-90s.

It predates MotoSim, and most likely, contemporary with ROTSY, Yaskawa's first simulator. In fact, both in ROTSY and in the first versions of MotoSim, the Job Editor was a complementary tool, since there was no VirtualPP, SimplePP, and much less JobPad. What existed before was a VERY simplified version of the Programming Pendant, which was not at all comfortable when doing any more elaborate editing.

Did you notice the Caution: No Syntax Checked comment there?

The Job Editor is a typical tool that falls into the category of a good idea with a bad implementation.

For example: Unlike MotoSim and other tools, which can support a range of products with the same license, in the case of Job Editor, for each version of Yaskawa's controller, there is a different version of Job Editor, and each different version of Job Editor requires a different license.

Another example: the price of a license (at least the last time I saw it) was basically the same as the MotoSim license. 🤷

Although it looks like a text editor, the initial idea of ​​Job Editor was to emulate - keeping the due proportions - the robot's Programming Pendant, so instead of the user simply typing the instructions, editing a job was done through several clicks on bottons and checkboxes. This method was not at all practical, but it avoided possible errors when inserting commands, and took advantage of the previous knowledge of those who were already used to using PP.

More recent versions have the so-called Text Mode, in which the user can actually write the commands as they would in a normal text editor.

YRC1000 Job Editor in Text Mode

But if Job Editor is a limited program that is supposedly no longer commercially available, why are we talking about it here?

Two reasons:

1) There was at least one time when this program helped me a lot. I had to commission a robot where absolutely all the comments were in German, and one of my tasks was to translate everything into English. As I translated the IO comments (which can be displayed next to the instructions, more or less like what happens in the robot's PP), these translations were propagated in the jobs, and the functioning of the system became clearer.

2) Job Editor falls into a category of programs that I am provisionally calling lightweight IDEs for industrial robots, and I intend to talk more about this in the near future.

Spoiler alert (in Portuguese, to keep it a lot more mysterious)!

Basically, the idea would be to not have to create a cell in a simulator every time I wanted to analyze a robot backup.

What about you? Have you used the Job Editor? If so, what did you think?

If not, do you think there would be room for a similar tool in your workflow?