Programs

The four kinds

Kind	What it is
Palletising	Generated from a recipe. This is what most cells run.
Standard	Written line by line, for logic a recipe does not cover.
Calibration	Measures where something really is. See Calibration.
External	A program that lives on the robot, called from Stackmill.

Programs live in folders and can call one another.

Palletising programs

You do not write these. You describe the product, the pallet and the pattern in a recipe, and the program is generated — every pick, every drop, every approach, in the right order, with the trajectories planned.

That is the point of Stackmill: the part of the job that is arithmetic and repetition is done for you, and the part that is judgement is left to you.

Standard programs

For everything a recipe does not describe: waiting on a signal, driving a conveyor, choosing between two behaviours. Written as a list of instructions.

The instruction set

Instruction	Does
MOVE	Go to a position
SET	Give a variable a value
WAIT	Wait for a condition or a delay
IF	Do something only when a condition holds
FOR / WHILE	Repeat
CALL	Run another program
LBL	A named point in the program
PRINT / COM	A message, and a comment

Conditions are built from variables. There is no text syntax to learn: an instruction is chosen and filled in.

External programs

Where a robot already has a program you want to keep, Stackmill can call it rather than replace it. Useful when commissioning a cell alongside something that already works.