Messages

451

General Mach Discussion / Re: Using SmartHome devices to extend Machine Capabilities

« on: June 16, 2017, 09:42:16 AM »

If you can make it work for you and your situation..... its most often a great idea. 

Mach can certainly be used to control things not on the CNC. Heck, they don't even have to be associated with CNC. Home automation, security, you name it. Its all I/O and mach is pretty good at receiving and sending that stuff. I have lots of plans for Mach4 in this regard.

I added a clapper to my mill once. People would come by and be looking at the mill. I would come out the office and say get you butt back to work and clap (which was tied to Cycle Start).  Some of the reactions were priceless.  Not the safest thing I ever did and neither was drag racing but they were both a lot of fun.

How about logging in remotely and turning the monitor off? Makes people think the machine is possessed. Once the steppers start with their demonic sounds they are certain of it. 

Or a sarcastic screen set that uses the speak function a lot......... that was a hoot but only intended for users with 0 insecurities. 

Just for fun I added in some code for the brown nosing redneck CNC on a customers machine once. Ran a lot of repetitive cycles. Each cycle it would speak "Gettin it done boss, gettin it done". When it reached the cycle count it would say "That job is done did, surely you can find another job for me to do".

If using Mach enhances your life in some way then your doing it right........ no matter what it controls. 

452

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: New CV tuning wizard

« on: June 15, 2017, 10:33:12 AM »

Open the wizard, enable CV Feedrate, accept then close Mach. That should make it so it sticks. I think what is happening is you have not saved the ini file with the CV feedrate enabled so it defaults to off. When you exit the config menu it goes back to default because you have not saved it as anything else. That is what happens here at least. I have no control of what happens when exiting the configuration dialog.

453

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: New CV tuning wizard

« on: June 15, 2017, 08:21:30 AM »

I have attached it to this post but there is not anything in it that is not in the wizard itself. If you read the instructions in the wizard, you have read the manual.

It's pretty straight forward. Click the button up top to enable CV feed rate and adjust the 2 sliders and accept.

The way it works is this. For CV feed rate there are 180 settings. One for each angle from 0-179 degrees. Each setting is the max feed rate you want the machine to take that angle at. So the wizard populates the setting for each angle based on slider positions. The stop angles greater than sets the feed rate for any angle greater than it to 0 which means it stops then makes the turn. An angle of 0 degrees can be taken as fast as any axis can go. An angle of one degree can be taken at what ever the Max feedrate slider is set to. That number is divided by the stop CV on angles greater than and the product of that is multiplied by each angle and that product is subtracted from the corresponding angle. That is how it works. The math may be slightly difference but the result would be the same. If you cannot get your CV Feedrate tuned to your liking using the CV tuning wizard you can use the CV_Feedrate wizard to manually enter any value for any angle (0-179).

Play with the wizard as you run the attached CVtest.txt Gcode file and notice the difference in the tool path for different angles.

454

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Lua ListBox

« on: June 15, 2017, 08:03:46 AM »

You will add items in the form builder project. Look at some of the existing list boxes.

These are the links I use.

http://www.lua.org/manual/5.2/

http://www.lua.org/pil/contents.html#contents

http://docs.wxwidgets.org/3.0.1/

455

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Mach4 - Constant Velocity & Exast Stop.

« on: June 14, 2017, 11:09:01 AM »

I'm pretty sure the mcCvTuningWizard was included in build 3390 but I know you can find the latest at the following link. Put it in your wizards folder and give it a go.

http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php/topic,34966.msg240319.html#msg240319

There are no P or Q parameters for G64 in Mach so be sure to clean those up in your Gcode.

456

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Integers defined

« on: June 07, 2017, 09:10:36 AM »

Yup, your jog type function will not change how any of the screen buttons work, what they do or display. Again...... another great and powerful thing about Mach4. You can set your pendent up to do one thing and your screen to do another. They can run their own totally independent functions or you can have them both run the same function. Just because a button press does an incremental jog doesn't mean a screen button press must do the same thing.

457

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Integers defined

« on: June 07, 2017, 06:33:03 AM »

Been looking at that, but having a tough time figuring things out I see there.  What does osig's have to do with toggling between INC and VEL?

In this case replace the word signal with flag when you think about. Most things in Mach4 have an associated signal. Checking those signals (flags) is a way to find out what mode it is in.

The core knows what state its in...... its an osig because it may need to send that state out to motion controllers, pendents, screens, etc. or all of the above. Mach4 gives you lots of tools.

A lot of the examples within the API docs are C++ however where you see something like X_AXIS you can put an mc. infront IE mc.X_AXIS and this will give you the correct result.

MC_JOG_TYPE_INC = mc.MC_JOG_TYPE_INC
MC_JOG_TYPE_VEL = mc.MC_JOG_TYPE_VEL

DazTheGas

Yup, these are constants. It's good practice to use them. Think of them as an alias. The benefit of using them is that updates could change the integer values but if your scripts are using constants it wont brake the script because the constant can be pointed to the correct integer.  If you check their value it will be == to some integer.

This is a nonsensical example that I can't see ever being a reality but a good example scenario so here goes......
The error message table for instance....... the constant mc.MERROR_NOERROR == 0. So today the script could use something like.......

if (rc == 0) then.....
or
if (rc == mc.MERROR_NOERROR) then

and they would both do the exact same thing because today mc.MERROR_NOERROR == 0.

Now pretend that for some reason the core code had to be changed because for whatever reason the error table must be changed so that 0 == mc.MERROR_GINORMOUSERROR and mc.MERROR_NOERROR == 1. If your script used the constant "if (rc == mc.MERROR_NOERROR) then" it would still work after the update. It would return a 1 now but the script would still work exactly as expected. However, if you were basing a decision on the error returning a 0 "if (rc == 0) then" your script would not work as expected because the meaning of 0 has changed from "no error" to "ginormous error".

I hope that makes sense.

I probably need to update the Mach4 lua language package I did for notepad++ but it does have all of the Mach4 constants in it (that existed when I did it).

458

Mach4 General Discussion / MOVED: Partial Solution to Axis will not Stop Moving when using Arrow keys

« on: June 06, 2017, 09:27:56 PM »

This topic has been moved to General Mach Discussion.

http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php?topic=35074.0

459

Show"N"Tell ( What you have made with your CNC machine.) / Re: Some quick projects for the kids and grandkids

« on: June 05, 2017, 09:29:24 AM »

I love them! The "Don't tread on me" is my favorite I think. 

Yeah, purpleheart is hard. You ever work with any ebony? It's dense but machines really nice. 

460

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Modify Touch Screen

« on: June 04, 2017, 02:35:07 PM »

That is the UI in the mcTouchOff.lua module. Your are welcome to edit the module to suit your needs. You can find the module in the Mach4 modules directory.

No, editing it it really won't resemble editing the standard screens at all. I created the UI using form builder. Have a look at the module and see if you still want to edit it and if you do, let me know and I will see if I can get you the formbuilder file for the UI.