Messages

141

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Simple one line MDI required

« on: May 20, 2018, 02:50:58 AM »

It's strange that you should have used Mach3 for PCB making because that's the industry I came from. I spent about 15 years designing a dedicated PCB drilling and routing CNC control which is still making circuit boards today. It's a far cry from today's offerings though, it all being based on dedicated Motorola 68000 hardware before PCs were mainstream. I'm no stranger to CNC control.

I'll take a look at the restart setup for Mach4 at some point. At least there's the chance that I could make my own version that wasn't as scary. I'm lucky in that I have a separate quill on my mill, so I can retract that out of the way prior to the restart and then pause to set it back to the right level. It's not ideal, but if I'm desperate then it can be done.
My old CNC has several strategies for restarting, none of which resulted in things getting trashed!

Thanks for the heads up on the API call, I'll take a look when I've got it all running.

142

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Simple one line MDI required

« on: May 19, 2018, 05:50:59 PM »

Hi Craig,
That's fair comment, and Mach4 is a massive piece of work that's going to take decades before it repays the effort put into writing it.

I only use the most basic of functions on Mach3, I don't trust it. So far I've had very few accidents, the worst being caused by the way that Mach3 restarts part way through a program. That's just plain dangerous in my opinion and I avoid it if at all possible since I'm never certain what's going to happen.

I need to get my head around the scripting and how to get that to work. I'm struggling to set jog increments and such like to be set from button scripts at the moment, hence another thread about that. I also need to set and clear LED components to work like Radio buttons, but I can't see how to access their properties from other components. Maybe you can't do that, who knows. All the other examples I'm looking at don't attempt to do anything like these things so I don't have much to go on.

143

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Simple one line MDI required

« on: May 19, 2018, 05:08:57 PM »

I couldn't agree more about Mach3, it grew into a monster. Mach4 is a different animal, but it's frustrating to find that things I used to take for granted now can't be done that way. I'm also struggling to get the old pendant to work, despite a kind forum member writing a basic driver for it. Setting up used to be dead easy, and now it's a pain in the neck until I work out ways round these issues.

I foolishly thought I'd just download Mach4 and start using it, but it's been painful, what with the backlash compensation ESS only just being implemented correctly.

Such is life, at least you can customise Mach4 and rip out all the stuff you don't need. I don't mind putting a bit of effort in to get it how I need it to be, but I don't want to spend months on that when I have jobs that need machining. I might have to go back to Mach3 in the interim until I can beat Mach4 into the shape I want it.

144

Mach4 General Discussion / Using a button script to set jog increments etc

« on: May 19, 2018, 04:47:59 PM »

I've created buttons that I want to be able to click to automatically set the Jog mode to incremental and a specified increment. I originally did this without scripts but found there's a bug that occasionally moves 1" instead of 1mm!!!
I found a post about this and another function that forces the Jog to be metric so I'd like to combine all three calls in one script.

This is what I have, but it doesn't work.

   local inst = mc.mcGetInstance()
      --First force units to metric, it sometimes reverts to inches!
   mc.mcJogSetUnitsMode(inst, mc.X_AXIS, 21)      --I don't know why 21, but that's what the post said!
   mc.mcJogSetType(inst, mc.X_AXIS, mc.MC_JOG_TYPE_INC)
   mc.mcJogSetInc(inst, mc.X_AXIS, 1)   --1mm increment
   
I know the script is being executed when I click the button, I added a 'hello world' dialog box to the start of it to check.
I presume that the calls are inaccessible from where I'm trying to call them from?

I need to do this so I know for certain what's going to happen when I'm using an edge finder, or nudging up to an edge with a cutter. 25mm unexpected moves are not acceptable!

Any help would be much appreciated.

145

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Simple one line MDI required

« on: May 19, 2018, 04:37:08 PM »

Hi,

Heaven knows why they changed it, if I need something in several lines of g-code I use a temporary program.

Funnily I find exactly the opposite, I often stack several lines and let it rip....As a matter of reflex I often end up hitting <enter> only to remember
that it doesn't work in the manner that it used to, but so what, there are a lot of things which don't work like they used to but they work so much
better now!

Craig

As it happens, you can do that in the Mach3 single line MDI too, you don't need a dialog box for that functionality

146

Feature Requests / Add a single line MDI with Enter property which executes like Mach3

« on: May 19, 2018, 04:00:31 PM »

I can't believe that something as useful as the single line MDI isn't available in Mach4. It's something I use all the time, say to move the head up just type Z10<cr> and it's job done. Now you have to type it in and then use the mouse to click Cycle Start, and beware leaving any existing code in the MDI else that gets executed too.

It's a pain in the neck. Please please can you add another property to the MDI component that you can check to have a Single Line MDI which activates when you hit Return just like it was in Mach3 if you don't like or need the multi line MDI.

I really don't get the point of it as a multi line MDI. This is why we have programs...

147

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Simple one line MDI required

« on: May 19, 2018, 03:54:36 PM »

Ctrl-Enter will execute the MDI.

Steve

Thanks for that Steve.

148

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Simple one line MDI required

« on: May 19, 2018, 03:54:06 PM »

Hi,
the short answer is no.

As it stands you are required to type your MDI code in the MDI window. I presume you are happy with that,
its similar to going to the MDI tab in Mach3.
If you hit <enter> you will start a new line in the MDI window, so you can have multi-line MDIs, quite handy.
Once your MDI code is complete then you are required to issue a MDIExexcute() command and for that purpose
the Cycle Start button is provided.

If you find hitting the Cycle Start button on screen inconvenient it would be possible to assign a spare keyboard
key and have that key execute the MDI. Clearly <enter> is used in other manners would not suitable, every time
you hit it an MDI would execute whether you intended it not.

Does that sound like a reasonable work-around?

Craig

Thanks Craig. That's a real pain because I use the one line and hit enter MDI on Mach3 all the time and this just isn't that convenient. Heaven knows why they changed it, if I need something in several lines of g-code I use a temporary program.
I'll put in a feature request. All it needs is a single property that says single or multi line in the MDI component and then everyone it happy.

149

Mach4 General Discussion / Simple one line MDI required

« on: May 17, 2018, 04:35:56 PM »

Can someone point me in the direction of a simple one line MDI implementation like there was in Mach3? I much prefer the way you could type a single command and hit enter to execute it.

There doesn't seem to be a property that can be set to execute on Enter, or to limit the number of lines to 1

Any help would be much appreciated.

150

Third party software and hardware support forums. / Re: Xhc HB04 MPG Pendent with Mach4

« on: May 17, 2018, 06:42:44 AM »

After a bit more testing, I think I can see what it's doing.

If you just launch Mach4 and turn on the pendant, if the X-axis is selected for example, one click of the handwheel moves it whatever the increment is set in the config in inches, regardless of whether the machine is set to run in Metric or Inch. So if the first entry in the table is 1 then it moves 25.4mm!
If you then press the selection button on the pendant to change the increment, then it seems to move in different amounts, although they are 10x too small. ie 100 moves 0.01mm not 0.1mm

So for the moment, I've set all the values in the config to 0.001 so at least it doesn't drive off a huge distance if I don't change the increment on the pendant. It looks like at the very least there needs to be a better initialisation of the first increment because it's undefined at the moment and frankly dangerous.

Ideally, it should just read from the config table and take note of whether it's metric or imperial.

Any improvement would be most welcome. I don't need any clever functions, just for the basic ones to be rock solid.
Thanks,
Roger