I scored a Scorbot ER iii and I ESPHomed it. Now it does silly stuff in my apartment.
Take a look at the LinkedIn vid to see it in action.
Or it’s here on Youtube if you have LinkedIn allegies:
There are 6 wires going between the Teaching Pendant (handset / control panel) and the control box in the DB-25 cable.
Pinout (I could check with multimeter and labelling is clear).
Info on Protocol:
Not sure yet if protocol for the pendant port is the same as the one for the computer port.
This is cool! Subscribing to see how it goes. Good luck!
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I bought a few different parts to try for breaking out the DB-25.
For now I try it like this for my test rig. I don’t know if I need the ±12V yet. Hopefully not…
I tried and abandoned a “pass through set-up”.
My initial solution used a “pass-through” set-up, where by a “man-in-the-middle” sat between the Pendant and the robot (pendant port). It could listen to messages the Pendant sent and inject it’s own.
Initially this seemed to work quite well. But once I started adding more processing that the messages had to go through (to track what was happening in the pendant messages), I found that the latency seemed to cause communications issues. Some routines (such as the homing routine) were very “chatty” (rapid back and forwards) and keeping up with this and parsing all the UART text seemed beyond what the ESP could handle (or at least beyond my rooky UART text parsing skills). For example the pendant continually asks the controller if it is about to stop moving when you hold down a movement key on the pendant, and issues a new movement when it is about to stop.
After frustration at not being able to get the pass-through solution scaled-out I desperately tried plugging in my solution to the computer port and to my surpsrise it worked quite well. The catch is that only one port can be used at a time and you can’t track Pendant commands. With the pass through you could use either the ESP or the pendant to control (rather than needing to switch).
Hooking up the ESP to the “computer port”.
Final solution is basically the same as “original” - a computer is hooked up to one port (the esp) and the pendant is hooked up to the other. The controller will only communicate through one at a time (you switch between them).
Config:
It’s a point in time dump. I doubt I’ll maintain it well since this is a pretty niche project.