Productive Robotics
Miller Welder EtherNet/IP Integration
Shipped in 3.5 weeks what Miller had scoped for a year.
The Problem
The OB7 collaborative robot needed to talk to Miller industrial welding power sources — AutoContinuum and DeltaWeld — over EtherNet/IP CIP. Packed binary I/O assemblies, strict timing, zero error messages on failure. Miller's own team estimated 1+ year for the integration. Fanuc was still working on theirs 9+ months in.
The Approach
Wrote a C++ EtherNet/IP driver with packed I/O assemblies mapped byte-for-byte to the welder's CIP object model. Optimized the Requested Packet Interval from 100ms down to 8ms, raising input telemetry to 125Hz. Built a generic P-code read/write system, decoded the packed P-code 800 process ID into wire size, wire type, gas mix, and process type, and added DeltaWeld profile pulse support across 8 memory slots. Same engineer wrote the full Vue 3 Pinia-backed tablet UI on top.
The Outcome
Delivered in approximately 3.5 weeks. The full Vue 3 tablet application that welding operators use daily spans 40+ pages. Followed up with a 3,000-line December refactor consolidating recipe translation and defining 14 YAML recipe files — zero downtime on production robots.
Packed binary protocols with strict timing constraints and zero error messages on failure — these aren't REST APIs.