Universal robots has just released a new software version, that provides a lot of new features in the URCaps SDK.
The PolyScope software 3.5.0.10584 is released along with SDK 1.2.41.
You can find the complete release notes here:
RELEASE NOTES
Some of the new API functionality includes:
- URCaps can now configure their child nodes. Meaning, that a parent node URCap, can read the current settings of and change the settings of child nodes. This enables URCaps to i.e. configure children waypoints; their position, speed, acceleration, blend radius and more – even add new waypoints automatically. This feature can be used, to generate complete program sections in an easy way, based on the users selection and decisions. Essentially making the programming much easier for the user, and hiding all the complex algorithms you make, to provide a great user experience.
- While built in nodes (Waypoint, Set, Wait, etc.) already have an API, so you can modify these. You can now also chose to offer a custom API for your program nodes accessible to the parent node, so your parent program nodes can essentially configure and setup its children URCap contributed nodes. This enables you to have a firm handshake between the parent and child URCap nodes, that you have developed, so you could configure all child nodes, built-in as custom nodes, based on the settings from your parent URCap.
- URCaps can now add PolyScope Variables, making these available to the user from Assignment dropdowns and more. You can also read all existing variables in PolyScope, enabling the user, to select in which variable, your measurement output should be stored in. This may be a great benefit, for all URCap that feedback information to the user, to be used within the rest of the program. The API will take care of the resolving your variable to an unused name, so you just have to provide the data, that we need to make available to the user.
- Images, labels, text fields and buttons now support touch events. This means., that you can get the clicked pixel coordinate within an image or another component, for the user to interact with this object. We believe this will be highly useful, for any developer with a vision system, in order to teach the part to locate, or define the work area. Be sure to use the TouchEvent, to check out this new functionality.
- URCaps can now request a Robot Position Callback, querying the user to define a position in the Move screen, and having the Pose and Joint angles fed back to the URCap. This enables developers, to allow the user to in an easy way, define a one or more robot positions, while the user has access to the Move screen functionality.
- URCaps can now in an easy way read PolyScope language, programming language and unit selection, to enable language and unit localization to conform with the 20 languages already supported by PolyScope. We encourage all developers, to consider these features, to enable localization between the different languages, the user natively have available.
- URCaps can now read and write Fieldbus signals (Ethernet IP, Profinet, RTDE) using the IO domain class. Directly from the URCap.
This can e.g. be used to allow the user to do live toggling of signals, and could be implemented as well for client side fieldbus connection URCaps. - A lot of other new features, such as creating Expression objects, easy traversal of program trees with a ProgramNodeVisitor, creating Value objects including unit selection, access to Tool and Base feature coordinate systems, new ScriptWriter methods, new CSS styling options In HTML and a lot more.
To help you get started with all these new features, we have more than doubled the demonstration samples enclosed in the API. The new samples available are: Coordinate Map (clicked position within image), Ellipse (robot position callback through Move tab, creating child nodes, configuring child nodes), Cycle Counter (configuring child node configurations, creating variable objects, creating expression objects), Idle Time (extracting program node configurations, creating variable objects) and Localization (getting user selected language, programming language and unit selection).
We have also added two new guidance documents to the SDK, namely on configuring child nodes and working with the new variables model to create new variables.
Doesn’t that sound very awesome?
Well, I guess it’s just about getting started with implementing some of all these new features in your URCaps, to provide an even easier and more intuitive experience to the user.
You can download the latest Starter Package, which includes the URSim 3.5 VM and the SDK installed - ready to go!
Or you can download the SDK as-is, and install this yourself.
Happy development!