Mecademic Meca500 - Writing Programs

User Manual for the Meca500 Industrial Robot (for rmware 10.1) 31
THE MECAPORTAL
opened programs, whether or not they are saved on the robot. To open a program that is already in the
robot's memory, click on the icon. You can also delete programs from the same menu. Alternatively,
you can delete a program that is open and in focus, by clicking the icon. To simply close an open
program, click the × on the tab with the program name.
A program can be called in another program with the StartProgram command, as in the following
example: StartProgram("my_folder/my_subfolder/program123").
To save and load programs from the robot, you must be connected to it in control mode, i.e., the
connection state icon displayed in the menu bar must be .
6.4.2 Writing programs
The code editor provides syntax highlighting. In addition, once you start typing a command, a list of
suggestions appears, allowing auto-completion. Furthermore, a brief description of the command
appears, as shown in Figure14. Additionally, pressing the secondary mouse button when your mouse
cursor is over the code editor text field brings a context menu with all available commands (Figure20).
The most important group is in "TO CURRENT POSITION" which inserts the selected command at the
text cursor with the arguments corresponding to the current robot position, the current tool reference
frame (TRF), and the current world reference frame (WRF). To cancel the context menu without inserting
a command, press Esc or click away.
Figure20: Context menu in the code editor
The code editor includes various editing features for productive source code editing. The shortcuts for
accessing these features are presented in Table 9. Note that you can select a block of text, a box of text
(column select), or even have multiple cursors. Each line that has a text cursor or a selection of text
becomes highlighted in gray and is called an active line. For example, in Figure20, line 11 is an active line.
Table 9: Keyboard shortcuts for source code editing
KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS FOR SOURCE CODE EDITING
Shortcut Action
Ctrl+Space
Open the auto-complete popup menu
Ctrl+Shift+Space
Open the command help popup
Ctrl+a
Select all
Ctrl+d
Add selection to next find match
Ctrl+f
Open the find and replace dialog