Your Rexroth electric motion control system can throw plenty of error messages. Perhaps one of the most frustrating is F9003: the watchdog error. A watchdog timer is designed to alert you to software or firmware issues. The program will normally reset the watchdog timer regularly. For Rexroth, that timer is set in milliseconds, so the… Read more »
If you see error message F229 on your Rexroth Indramat drive, you’ve encountered a quadrant error. Don’t worry about the quadrants. This is a hardware error. But you can’t tell just from this message which piece of hardware is causing the problem. You could have a defective encoder cable. This is a common problem, since… Read more »
Ah, technical manuals. It’s hard to imagine a less thrilling topic, but when you need them, you really need them. I remember one company we worked with. This firm’s unofficial motto was “RTFM – Read The Fantastic Manual.” The phone support staff had standing orders to ask every customer if they had their manual handy,… Read more »
IndraDrive C Error Codes fall into eight classes: F2xxx: non-fatal error F3xxx: non-fatal safety technology error F4xxx: interface error F6xxx: travel range error F7xxx: safety technology error F8xxx: fatal error F9xxx: fatal system error E-xxxx: fatal system error “processor exception” You can tell which kind of error you’re looking at by the first two characters… Read more »
Workplace safety is a primary priority in factories these days. Of course, safety has been regulated in U.S. manufacturing for at least a century, but consumers are now more aware and retailers are more insistent. As a result, machine makers including Rexroth have an even stronger focus on safety. But we also know that it’s… Read more »
The first fatal accident involving an automated vehicle took place in Florida. From the point of view of technology, the Tesla vehicle couldn’t tell the difference between the side of a white truck and the very bright Florida sky. The real cause of the problem, however, was that the human driver wasn’t paying attention, so… Read more »
Way before the internet of things, we quit getting up and walking to the TV to change the channel. We’ve had electric pencil sharpeners to save us from the effort of turning a crank and electric paper towel tearing machinces to save us from… Not really sure what that was supposed to save us from…. Read more »
The most exciting thing about new technologies in industry is that machines can communicate with one another as well as with humans, workpieces, and so forth. This provides opportunities for machine learning, for increased flexibility and speed, and for many new capabilities we haven’t even dreamed of yet. The most frightening thing about new technologies… Read more »
3-D printing, also called additive manufacturing, creates objects bit by bit, extruding molten plastic (and sometimes other things) onto a foundation with a 3-axis deposition head in painstaking layers that eventually build an object. To keep that molten plastic molten, the building is generally done in an oven. And this one feature has been the… Read more »
Human beings teach one another quite naturally. Other animals don’t teach, but they do learn from one another by copying behaviors that lead to positive results, like getting food. Machines can learn, in a very specialized sense of the word “learn,” but they never teach one another. Until now. Google is teaching robots to teach…. Read more »