jpkh / crs-c500c-utils

Utilities for Thermo CRS C500C series robot arm controllers

Tools for Thermo CRS C500C Robot Controller

This repository contains various tools that are useful with the Thermo CRS C500C robot arm controllers. These were manufactured between 1997 and 2002 and are used with CRS F3, A465 and A255 robot arms.

Various documentation can be found on Google, I have collected them here: http://jpa.kapsi.fi/stuff/other/crs_robot/

Original software

The original system is meant to be used with Robcomm3 Windows software, which I do not have available. It would directly support file transfer to and from the controller using some unknown protocol.

The controller itself runs some kind of embedded Unix-alike called CROS. It can be accessed by the serial port on the front of the device with default baudrate of 57600 bps.

The controller has firmware filesystem in 1 MB flash, which is not written to in operation. A 512 KB RAM-based filesystem backed up by 3.6V lithium battery is overlaid on it, and user files are stored here. By holding down F1, F2 and P/C buttons down while booting the device goes into diagnostic mode that allows transferring flash and nvram contents to/from PC using a simple protocol that resembles XMODEM but doesn't seem compatible. See bootloader_download.py in file_transfer folder.

In the filesystem there is available a few useful tools, such as r3c compiler for the RAPL-3 language and edit as a simple line editor.

File transfer

To permit easy file transfer between PC and CROS, first step is to install uudecode on the target. After that other files can be transferred using it.

G Code interpreter

Eventual goal of this project is to implement a G code interpreter in RAPL-3. It would read G-code commands from the serial port and execute them as robot movements.