Sending Pulse from Robots plugin to UR10 robot

[MaryShafiei]

Hi everyone. I've been trying to use UR10 robot with an extruder for 3D printing. I've defined direction, enable/disable function, and pulse as digital outputs in Robots plugin but noticed pulse does not work. Then, I tried the 'PulseDO' command in the plugin to send pulse to the extruder but no success as apparently this command does not work with UR robots. Do you have any idea if there is a way to overcome this issue within the plugin? Is there any update coming soon to solve this?
I've tried to use Arduino to send pulse separately to the extruder while controlling pathways and other parameters in Grasshopper. However, it causes several issues to create a seamless workflow which is crucial in my experiment. I appreciate any advice and help.
Thanks,
Maryam

[KonradJuenger]

Hi Maryam,

I made a script to pulse a digital output on UR. It works by opening a new thread and setting the output to high, waiting, then setting it to low again.

There are some issues with it: you'll have to filter out pulses with the same length and you'll can overload the controller by sending many pulses

PulseDO

[KonradJuenger]

Thanks for the hint and - yes I used pulseDO to communicate to an arduino separated by an optocoupler. For my needs sending one pulse per target worked fine, but setting up persistent thread and only updating the pulse width is much better of course 🙂.

[MaryShafiei]

Awesome, thanks @KonradJuenger and @visose for your time and help.
As @visose mentioned, I need a fast and continuous pulse signal for a stepper motor. It seems the external controller (in my case Arduino) for sending continuous signal should be the option then :-)

[visose]

Update 1.5.1 has the PulseDO command working for UR, but it's the 'one-off' version.

The signal is turned on in the main thread, then a second thread runs that switches the signal off after a delay.
The reasoning for this is that this might sync better with robot motion than having it turn on in the second thread, but could as well have no difference. Turning the signal on at the right time is more important than when it turns back off.

[KonradJuenger]

This was quick! Thanks for the update and including pulseDO.

[MaryShafiei]

Amazing, thanks @visose for the update.