Hello,
I’m testing a Profinet connection between a UR3e robot and a Siemens S7-1200 PLC. I already have the communication working correctly.
Now I’m trying to find a way to monitor the connection status on the robot side. I already implemented this on the PLC side, but on the robot the only available option I know of is configuring the robot behavior in the Installation tab in case of communication faults. In that case, the robot can pause or stop the program.
My goal is to detect communication problems inside the robot program without stopping it.
I know I can implement a heartbeat bit between the PLC and the robot using registers to monitor the connection status. However, I was also thinking about the yellow/green LED shown in the Installation screen. Is that information available in any way from within the program? Is there any undocumented or lesser-known function to retrieve that status?
I couldn’t find anything helpful in other forum posts.
Another related question concerns the default state of the input registers when the communication goes down. From my tests, I can confirm that the last received values are preserved in the robot. However, this is not the usual behavior on a PLC in Profinet communications. When the connection fails, input registers typically go to 0, and you can also check the quality/status bits of the received data.
I haven’t seen anything similar in the robot’s Profinet client implementation, nor any option to change this behavior.
Thanks.
Miguel Angel López Prieto