ok, let’s give this robot one more try at getting it to work well and be useful.
tl;dr it was originally deployed at a volkswagen factory and came with a customized, volkswagen-specific control cabinet (on the right, the one with “broken robot” poster) which is absolute hell to get to work right standalone, without an external plc controlling it over interbus. hardware is different enough that it can’t be easily converted, software that works with this hardware is heavily stripped down and lacks critical features.
so I finally managed to track down a stock version of the control cabinet. it’s incomplete, but I can do some part swaps to get it to work and it was cheap.