RotoScheduler manual › Read the board

Mold bands and colours

Describes RotoScheduler 0.3.2 · checked 2026-10-10 D5

A coloured band follows a mold across the cycles where it stays mounted. Its height is the room the mold takes on the spider: the arm row stands for the spider's disc, a band for the mold's footprint with the clearance around it, and two copies are twice as tall as one.

Folded and unfolded

Folded, an arm row is a thin thumbnail of the same picture, so you can see at a glance how full each arm is. Unfolded, the row is drawn at its real size and each band carries the mold's name and, above one copy, its count. Hover a band for the mold name, the count and the number of cycles. A dotted line under a folded arm's bands means more molds than the thumbnail can show; click it to unfold the arm. The arm's spider area is written under its name. Hover a loaded cycle, or hold Ctrl and click it, for the weight of the molds it mounts against the arm's maximum load, such as 553 of 1000 kg; where the machine data gives the arm no maximum load, the weight alone.

What the colours mean

Colours identify molds, not whether a destination is acceptable. Several molds can share a palette colour, so use the name to identify one exactly. The bands show how busy an arm is; whether a move fits is decided by the green and red room when you move, see Move a run, then undo.

The molds table in Factory inputs lets you change a mold's colour. If only colours have changed, the button reads Save colours and keeps the plan.

A mold newly added by Take from masterdata starts with its workbook color. A mold already in the plan keeps its RotoScheduler color, including an automatic color.

A copy that comes from another arm (0.3.0)

A mold copy can be handed over during the day: freed by the crew before the shift from an arm with nothing else to do, or moved from the machine that finished with it. The receiving arm's mount cannot start before the copy is free plus the transfer time between the machines; a move within one machine costs no transfer time. When the timing does not work, the day stops at that visit with a sentence naming the copy and the arm that holds it, for example "{copy} is held by {machine} arm {arm} and has not been released; the load is not admitted at this visit." or "{copy} is released by {machine} arm {arm} at {release}; it arrives at {arrival} after {minutes} min, later than the mount at {mount}, so the load is not admitted at this visit."

A mold unmounted after a cycle of the day

A saved plan can also unmount a mold from an arm after one of that arm's cycles, so that another arm can mount it later the same day. With a mold transfer lag of one cycle, a mold unmounted after cycle 3 can be loaded elsewhere from cycle 5. On a fixed-arm machine the mold comes off at the service station when its arm's cycle is demolded, and takes the mold's unmounting time; on a machine with no stations described, like the sample's RM-5 and RM-6, nothing is timed. The app reads such an unmounting from a plan file and keeps it when the plan is saved; a move or a drop adds one where its copy sits idle on another arm. Not supported:

• Generate never unmounts a mold after a cycle, so an arm that waits for a mold left on an idle arm stays idle.
• On a fixed-arm machine a mold comes off only after a cycle of its own arm with no cycle of that arm right after it; an arm with no cycle that day releases its mold before the shift instead. Another arm takes the mold only where it arrives no later than that arm's mounting starts. The molds of an arm's cycle are mounted at that arm's visit to the service station for that cycle: an arm that starts the day at cycle 5 passes the service station empty in cycles 1 to 4, so the mold must arrive by its fifth visit. Empty turns add only indexing time; the machine does not wait for a mold, which must arrive by its mounting. On a machine with no other arm working that day the empty turns take minutes, so a mold freed elsewhere later in the day is refused as late.
• A mold unmounted on a machine with no stations described never reaches a fixed-arm machine the same day, because its unmounting has no clock time; a release before the shift does.
• With no mold transfer lag, an arm that takes the mold in the very next cycle must reach the service station after the arm that gives it up.
• An unmounting names one mold instance, such as M-1, but each cycle is given the free instances of its mold in their numbered order: after an edit elsewhere the arm may hold another instance, and the unmounting is then not done, with a note.
• An unmounting on a closed day is not done, on any machine: for a machine that has stopped, release the mold before the shift. An unmounting after a cycle the day does not have is not done on a fixed-arm machine; on a machine with no stations described it frees the mold from the next cycle plus the mold transfer lag on that date, as any unmounting does.
• An unmounting saved after cycle 2147483647, the largest number a plan file accepts, is neither carried out nor noted.
• On a machine with no stations described a cycle shows no mold status: a cycle left without its mold shows only in the notes and in the next day's opening.
• One arm releases one mold instance once a day: a plan file with two unmountings of the same instance by the same arm on one date, or an unmounting and a release before the shift, is refused.
• No unmounting or transfer minutes are counted on a machine with no stations described, and the crew's capacity is not checked.
• An edit that changes the arm's loads can leave an unmounting that is no longer done: the note says so, and saving the plan drops it.