Hi everyone,
We are currently researching options for a remote teach pendant access from a PC. Basically something that mirrors the TP screen and you can access it with any VNC software. For now I’ve come up with ARCS2, Nutai, KPI and Robotiq’s Insights. Most use a VNC protocol except for Insights I presume. Insights, including the starting package is the priciest of them all and we already have a local network set up globally, thus we wouldn’t need all the hardware that comes included.
I’ve tried out KPi and ARCS2 trial options, and both worked however when using KPI software, the Polyscope OS froze once. The trial for Airgate ARCS2 is limited to one minute from activation so no real testing could be done, but we did get a feel for it.
My question is, what is your experience with using these kind of approaches with remote tending in a different country? Have any of you used this in real production on a longer term?
This would be intended only for maintanence and direct support, as well as uploading updates. For productivity monitoring we intend to use Beacon.
Kind regards,
We use TightVNC Viewer from the PC. I believe there are several free viewers that will work.
There was an installation process on the robot - our UR rep sent us an installation package - not a UR product, but
something he came across. It includes a magic file and other necessary files which are placed on a USB stick then will automatically load into the robot (have to reinstall any time a Polyscope upgrade is done).
Pretty seamless.
Seems to work across our VPN when I take my laptop home.
Here’s a screenshot of the readme file and some of the files in the installation package:
Check this thread out
Hi! Thanks for this.
This seems to be a Magic that installs x11vnc on the OS. How is it holding up? Any issues with this since it’s not an UR certified approach? Have you been using it long? I’m reluctant to install anything on a production robot from 3rd party, that isn’t verified .
Kind regards,
We’ve been using that setup for about a year now, and are up to 9 UR5e robots connected. Occasional dropped connections but no other conflicts that I remember.
However, there are some non-related security issues that you should watch for with these robots. Change the default passwords on your robot & make sure you have the latest polyscope version.
There’s some malware floating around out there that can find its way onto the controller since the passwords are freely available. We saw that issue long before we started using the VNC software.
I should note that we also use WinSCP for file transfer/backup. That woks quite well also.
Thanks for the reply. I’m glad to hear that i works well, and that sounds good enough for me. I’ve already managed to install it and works fine for now.
Interesting, I haven’t heard anything like that before. Can you elaborate a bit more on what kind of malware it is and how to spot it?
Thanks!
If I remember what our IT network specialist told me correctly -
Our network monitoring software picked up that one of our robots was “calling home” to an overseas server. He believed that the malware entered our system thru one of the typical methods - email attachment, etc. then worked it’s way through until it found one of the robots with the default password and was able to infect that robot.
I haven’t had to get into the details myself, but password changes and making sure the communication settings within the controller are set correctly are the main things. I believe the more recent polyscope updates default to the more secure settings and add some additional features to help.
I’m not in the office this week so I can’t check to see how ours are actually set.
There are probably others reading this who are more knowledgeable than I who may chime in.