What is it?

The Program Execution Log is a list of steps the robots controller has executed in the execution order. The list will be provided for each process that is supported by the robot. For a normal Kawasaki six axis robot (such like the RS007N) there will be a foreground process and fife background processes.

How it works

While executing a program (in one of the processes) each step will be stored in the robot controller with it's timestamp. There are one thousand entries for the steps of each process.

In the AS source you'll find the section .EXECPGLOG for this entries. Each step in each process is stoered in it's own line. The line starts with the entry number (1 ... 1000) followed by the timestamp (date and time). The next text is language-dependent for program name. Next is the name of the executed program followed by a language-dependent text for step number. The line ends with the step numer of the specific step in the program.

How do K-IDE assist you?

As you see it would be a huge work to find out what the robot is really doing when looking at the log entries. K-IDE will show the log in a special window calles Program execution log window. In that window you'll find 3 sections:

1. Task name: foreground and background tasks
2. History: the program steps in ascending order (earliest first)
3. Program view: the program where the actual selected step is highlighted

How to analyse the program flow

If you for example like to see what your robots foreground program is doing, select Robot program from the drop down list Task name. Then click into the list History and select one step number. You'll see that K-IDE immediately shows the selected program on the right side and highlight the selected step. You are now able to "scroll" through your program with your cursor-up and cursor-down keys and see what your program is doing. You can see which conditions are skipped and which programs are called.

Remarks and limitations

One thousand entries seams to be very much but in some conditions it is not enough. If you're using not only simple waits but also check other things while waiting you will likely use a loop or something like that. For that reason 1000 steps are shortly used up.

When adding or deleting code of some program, the step numbers in the log file are no more valid respectively points to the wrong location in the program. In such a case you'll get the wrong program flow!

For using this functionallity you should not use empty lines. Such lines are totally ignored by the controller and therefor are not counted as step numbers. You will get the wrong program flow!