CRS A255-What's it worth?

[gp99]

I did some horsetrading and aquired 2 CRS A255 Robotic arms and the C500 controller. It also had the optional Homing Bracket and umbilical.
It did not have the umbilicals to attach the arms to the controller or the Teaching Pendant. It also did not have the Teaching Pendant.
When I was cleaning the arms they looked to be in great shape. The C500 controller only had the power cord so I plugged it in and pushed the power button,the fan came on and so did the lights in the buttons on the front.
One arm is a CRS A255 Robotics with no end effector and the other arm is a CRS A255PLUS with a pneumatic gripper for the end effector.
My wife is disabled and my health is in not much better condition and as much as I would like to keep them I really need a 4 wheel drive tractor with a bucket on the front. It does not have to be running, but no junk. I wil consider all sizes and manufacturers.
I don't know if I will trade or sell but I will make a decision by the end of June.
I believe they were manufactured in 95 or 96.
Anybody have an idea of what they are worth if I decided to sell them?
Are they just worth the price of a headlight on a tractor???<G>!!

[feedtherobot]

Hey GP99!
Quite a find you have. These were made near my hometown in Ontario, Can 94 .. some components 93.
They were formidable in the mid 90s. I have a A465 in my garage. Arm is nice but the controller is a little buggy.
The issue I found with these is that although the actual arm hardware hasn't evolved by leaps and bounds the software and the controller have been left in the dust.
Thermo CRS no longer exists which means no service and parts are few and far between.
Software support? Nope.
RAPL can be upgraded at cost or you'd have to hunt down an old compatible pc to use it's original windows 95/98 programming software to do anything with it or stock up on ASAs to manage the migraine you'll receive from investigating a virtual machine option ... I have no idea..

So no cables, no teach pendant, no EOAT, no software and no support.

Hope you end up with your tractor light lol jk

I paid $500 for my complete system including software and tooling. Played around but I certainly overpaid by a few hundred.

However they are pretty neat to prop up in view of guests, i enjoy the novelty.

Your post is 2010, I'd love to know what became of these.

Cheers

[gp99]

Hey Feedtherobot!
Been awhile since I've been on here. I'm still poor-boying it out here in the country and having fun tinkering and getting in trouble with the wife...!!
Finally horsetraded for a small and I mean small tractor and I did have to buy the headlights!
Still have the arms and you are right......they are a good conversation piece and so far that is just about it.
One of these days I would like to have the time and skill to actually do something with them....open a beer can or something..
Don't know if I could hook them up to a joystick or whatever......
I have a small machine shop type fabrication shop and do some woodworking on the other side of it.
It's all just for tinkering around and doing a few small jobs as I still can't get around very well.....depends on how I feel and price and availability of my medicine...
Right now I am doing some maintenance on some equipment that I need to build the tools to make the equipment to fix the driveway...(get all that?)
Do you think you are going to do anything with yours?
I would hate to rob them of parts to make something else, but....????

[feedtherobot]

OOO yea Robot Arm Teach Pendants are much more complex than one might expect. Making one can be done but it would be a complicated undertaking. A simple Arduino with LCD and keypad should do it but figuring out how to make it "talk" to the controller would be time consuming I'm estimating.
I don't know how familiar you are with microcontroller programming but you sound multidiscipline.
I would never suggest ... but I suppose you could pull the servos out of the arms but robot arms are just so much cooler to have taking up space on a shelf than a pile of motors. Unless you need one specifically for a project.

If you make it through the first stages of robot system setup ... which would certainly include aquiring a compatible teach pendant for the C500, I can see about setting you up with a copy of the software required to program them.

And I've just been making simple pick and place programs with the RAPL.
I also have an air drilling EOAT. I'm sure I'll integrate it with some other project at some point in the future.

[gp99]

I know diddly squat about microcontroller programming.......
I do build and or machine-fabricate a lot of unusual projects, but, not
on the electronics side. Some of them on the electrical side with simple switches, contacts, etc.
I enjoy taking old antique or new or odd equipment and bring them back to working order, making them look good and them doing as good as, or better than they did at first.....some really big and heavy and some using magnifying
glass to help....
It would be nice to just get them to work manually-directly from a joystick
type controller and be really neat to also have feedback as to pressure you are putting on the end effectors...
Am I just totally out of the ballpark on something like that?
I would really like to mess around with them and other things like that but just don't have the time right now.....
I will never live long enough (or have enough money?) to do all the things I
would like to do and see all the things I would like to see...
Guess I'm not the only one in that boat though......