In PolyScopeX, we’ve made an effort in allowing users to customize the Operator Screen, giving you more flexibility to adapt the interface to your workflow. However, we know that popups remain an important tool for providing real-time warnings, instructions, or context-aware information during robot operation.
As we look to improve the popup system, we’d love to hear what features would make your work easier and more efficient.
Here are some potential ideas for enhancement:
Customizable Text Formatting: Add options for bold, italics, or underlined text, as well as font size and alignment adjustments.
Dynamic Content: Display real-time variables with precise formatting (e.g., decimals, units) or automatically adjust content based on program state.
Interactive Features: Include buttons (e.g., “Retry,” “Skip”), text input fields, or dropdown menus for decision-making.
Flexible Layouts: Enable resizing, screen positioning, or theming (e.g., light/dark mode or color-coded alerts).
Multimedia Support: Add the ability to include images, instructional videos, or QR codes for manuals or troubleshooting.
Advanced Behaviors: Time-based auto-dismissal, priority levels (info vs. warnings), or popup chaining for step-by-step workflows.
Questions for You:
Which of these features do you find most critical for your workflows?
Are there other enhancements you’d like that we haven’t mentioned?
How do you currently use popups, and how could they be improved to better support your operations?
Your feedback will help us ensure that the next iteration of the popup system meets your needs and enhances your experience with Universal Robots.
Looking forward to your insights!
Best regards,
Alexander
Design Architect, PolyScope X
A current design limitation I ran into with popups on a customer’s application. Tee HTML formatting of the numeric boxes doesn’t work. So Flexible Layouts would definitely be a nice feature!
An issue I’ve run into a few times is using informational popups which don’t pause the program - they do, however, take control of the pendant, not allowing the operator to hit the pause or stop buttons, or the speed slider.
That’s caused a couple crashes.
One function I’ve wished for in the past is for a way to dismiss a popup via urscript or when an input/variable reaches a certain state. That way I can put a non-blocking popup on the screen asking an operator to perform a task and immediately put the robot into a loop where it monitors the input and waits for the task to be complete. As soon as the task is complete it will see the input reach the desired state, clear the popup automatically and exit the loop. It eliminates the need for the operator to close the popup manually after performing the task.
Somewhere at the start of your program (in the Before Start works great) assign a variable to the socket_open() of the Dashboard server. Once you have that, you can use the socket_send_string() and socket_send_byte() command to close the popup.
So in this example, you will see the popup appears, then it enters the loop that sits there for 3 seconds (could be waiting for other sensors or whatever) and then the socket commands close the popup and the program ends. You can see the state of the “testVar” variable to see that it changes state after the popup closes.
thank you for the opportunity to provide feedback. Here are my thoughts on the proposed improvements:
Currently, I use the integrated popup function in the user interface when the program needs to stop at a popup. However, to display warnings like “Box almost full,” I use the popup function via UR Script, as this allows the program to continue running.
I would like to see better text formatting options in the popups to make them more appealing for the operator. Additionally, displaying real-time variables would be great to show the current progress to the operator in the foreground.
All of the following are things I’ve gone “man, it sure would be nice if popups could do that”:
-Automatically adjust content based on program state
-Buttons (e.g., “Retry,” “Skip”), or dropdown menus for decision-making
-Enable resizing, screen positioning
-Time-based auto-dismissal, priority levels (info vs. warnings), or popup chaining for step-by-step workflows
Something that I would like to see is a before start checklist (to confirm certain tasks are complete before starting the program and/or for data entry). On two projects I’ve needed to have a series of popups at the start for the operator to enter the specific parameters of the program, and it would be a lot nicer to have 1-2 popups instead of the operator clicking through 5 or more every time they start the program.
Thank you for taking the time to provide your insights and suggestions. Your feedback is highly appreciated! I hope the enhancements we’ve introduced in the Operator Screen will address some of the requests shared here. The idea is for operators to utilize the screen for pre-program setup, while popups can handle inputs dynamically during program execution.
From your answers, I noticed a mix of requests—ranging from styling improvements to logic controls.
I’ll be working on a proposal for how these changes could look early next year, and I’ll share it with you for further feedback and collaboration.
Also, a shoutout to Eric for his helpful contributions—this kind of knowledge sharing is what makes this community fantastic!
and this post is still open, please bring in more use cases and requests
