Controlling I/O via ROS?

[AnkitAggarwal0]

I'm working on a pipeline to parse DXFs for additive manufacturing on the Lincoln Electric Classmate. It consists of a Fanuc 50iD/7L Robot Arm with R30iB+ Mate controller. I've been able to get the ROS-I interface running and can control trajectories.
To enable/disable the laser and wire feed, I need to be able to control I/Os. They are interfaced via a Keyence PLC. While reading through the Karel Programming manual, I noticed that I/Os can be controlled.

Is there a way I can extend this control to ROS? If this is not in the plans, can anyone point me in the right direction? Any help will be appreciated.

Additionally, the Classmate system comes with an Air Knife to keep the environment inert. While executing trajectories via MoveIt, this air knife turns on, despite not being needed to execute trajectories. It is interfaced to an I/O pin (digital pin out #69) which is toggled. If this is being done by the ROS program, is there a way I can turn this off?

Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Ankit

[gavanderhoorn]

Is there a way I can extend this control to ROS?

quite some time ago I wrote a candidate REP for generic IO control over simple message. We (as in: ROS-Industrial) never added that to a driver, but several forks did. I saved a couple as branches, such as https://github.com/gavanderhoorn/industrial_core/tree/colin-lewis-19_melodic-io. Note both the Karel code and the changes needed to industrial_core.

However, I would perhaps recommend using something like Fanuc's Python scripts they distribute on the cRc (in the US) or my own gavanderhoorn/comet_rpc or gavanderhoorn/dominh. None of these come as ready-to-go ROS nodes, but wrapping the last two in a simple Python-based node should not be too much work (and you don't need any additional options on your controller to get IO R/W to work).

Additionally, the Classmate system comes with an Air Knife to keep the environment inert. While executing trajectories via MoveIt, this air knife turns on, despite not being needed to execute trajectories. It is interfaced to an I/O pin (digital pin out 69) which is toggled. If this is being done by the ROS program, is there a way I can turn this off?

Both the Karel and TP programs used a set of registers and flags to communicate. The defaults are documented here. I don't recognise DOUT[69] as being one of them, but perhaps your controller has an interconnection configured or someone has changed the configuration of either the Karel or TP programs to use that IO somehow.

As that appears to be a configuration issue local to your controller, I can't really help there without (much) more information.