I have recently acquired a demo torque tool from Ingersoll Rand and have been trying to integrate it with my Tulip apps to get torque value readouts for various QC checks on the manufacturing line. However, I am having trouble connecting the torque tool to Tulip and have been unable to get any sort of communication between them. The specific tool is an Ingersoll Rand Nutrunner which is connected to a workstation via USB. According to their sales rep this model is compatible with open protocol and can be used with Tulip.
I have looked at THIS LINK for some inspiration on setting this up. However, the video and most of the content there seems to deal with devices that would be connected via an edge device over the internet (thus the configuring with an IP address). We are trying to do direct USB wired connection to the PC running Tulip.
So far I have enabled the following drivers at the station
I am then reading out the variable Tightening data as text so it can be viewed in real time when running the app. However, despite having a programmed routine on the device and running it through some cycles I have not been able to get any readouts into Tulip. I am able to connect to the device via the INSIGHT Connect software which came with the device and get live readouts, so I feel pretty confident that the device is able to speak with my computer. I am just a bit lost on the Tulip side of things.
Does anyone have any information that might help with this?
As of today our Torque Open Protocol driver only supports connecting to devices over Ethernet. In the case of Ingersoll Rand, you would likely need to pair your torque tool with a torque controller that is both capable of connecting over Ethernet/IP and supports Atlas Copco Open Protocol.
It also does not appear that the INSIGHT Connect software exposes any interfaces for integrating with another system like Tulip.
Once you do have a compatible torque controller connected to your PC, on the Tulip side you’ll first need to connect to the device using a trigger like the one below before you are able to receive the tightening data, tool status, etc. from it.
Thank you for the response. I had the Ingersoll Rand guys come back yesterday with a new fancy torque tool and I was able to successfully connect it to Tulip and was able to read out some torque data as you can see in the attached image.
However, we also wanted to test some job selection capabilities. This would essentially be a static value or a variable sent from Tulip to the tool in order to select one of the pre-programmed torque routines. I was unable to get this working unfortunately. Below are pictured the trigger I have setup to select the routine, and the error message I receive when I try to run the trigger.
It is giving me an internal server error. I will try tinkering around with this some more in the coming days, but any help or advice on this would be greatly appreciated !
SamBurck,
Is the tool connected to a controller? If yes, confirm in the controllers menu, Wireless Tools > Job Selection is set to External-MES. Also, confirm a Pset profile and a Job have been created and assigned to the tool.
I actually do not have a controller at all. This Ingersoll Rand QX torque tool is connected to Tulip purely over Wifi. As you can see above I am able to read out torque values from the device into Tulip this way.
I spoke with the Ingersoll Rand tech support yesterday and they said that Tulip should be capable of sending Pset selection commands straight to the tool without the need for a controller. Apparently they have other customers that are currently using this workflow. I am still unable to get it to work unfortunately. It seems that the device internal Pset selection setting keeps resetting to “internal” every time I try setting it to “external”. The Ingersoll Rand people were unsure why this would be happening so I am opening up a support ticket with them.
If you have any more information or tips on trying to resolve this I would love to hear them.
