Messages

5351

Mach4 General Discussion / List of Control States?

« on: February 08, 2018, 01:15:11 PM »

Hi All,
have had reason recently to consider Machs control states, I've had my nose rubbed in 'Idle' but I'm not sure what all the other states are or what they mean.
Is there a list or explanation somewhere?

Craig

5352

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: VistaCNC P2-S malfunctioning with Mach4

« on: February 08, 2018, 01:03:37 PM »

Hi,

that while running gcode the pendant drops back to the screen reading VistaCNC iMach4 and is dead until a Mach4 restart

Surely it has to work that way. If Mach has planned and calculated a coordinated move and while that move is progressing you try to do a little jog
when the move completes the controlled point will not be where its supposed to be but displaced by the jog amount. Either way Mach has no knowledge
of where it is now and its still planning moves 20 or more instructions ahead. A disaster is about to strike.

A pendant (or jog or MDI or screen script) can only move the machine if Gcode is NOT running ie the control state is Idle. <Feed Hold> does not put the control state
to Idle, <Feed Hold> followed by <Stop> do.

Craig

5353

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: M6 Doesn't work...

« on: February 08, 2018, 12:52:54 PM »

Hi,
when executing a manual M6 the macro will have to include a CycleStop or equivalent. The control state then goes to Idle and so you can jog or MDI.
Once you've finished clamping the tool in place you can continue to jog and or MDI. Alternately you could have a screen button that takes you to a touch
off location.

Note that all these jogs, MDIs or Button moves can only occur when the control state is Idle. When you are done hit <cycle start> and the Gcode file takes over,
of course the control state is no longer Idle.

A statement like GcodeExecuteWait() executes its line or lines of code as if they were entered as MDI.

You may have noticed in another thread when I was doing something similar I 'ran aground' where even though the control state was Idle the GcodeExecuteWait()
call didn't progress and would return MERROR_NOT_NOW. Exactly what circumstances that an API fails to progress are not clear to me yet.

What that experience has taught me is that you should always test the return codes of any API if you expect your code to be robust.

Craig

5354

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: M6 Doesn't work...

« on: February 08, 2018, 03:27:16 AM »

Hi,
I change all tools manually.....so long as Mach pauses for me to change the tool and touch off I'm good...don't need anything else.

I used to have a somewhat more sophisticated m6 routine but it didn't give me any advantage. I still have to clamp the tool in the toolholder so its no
problem for me to touch off either. The biggest crashes I've had is where my brains gone to sleep or I expected some automatic or semi automatic function
to work just so which lulls my brain to sleep....

Craig

5355

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: VistaCNC P2-S malfunctioning with Mach4

« on: February 08, 2018, 03:19:15 AM »

Hi,
I use a VistaCNC P1A and it works fine, it doesn't have those extra functions.

Fortunately it doesn't turn into a brick either.

Craig

5356

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Goto work 0

« on: February 08, 2018, 01:58:40 AM »

Hi Mark,
I agree, the software I use has all the Allen Bradley servos in a database with electrical, magnetic, thermal and physical parameters. It was not necessary for me to
tune anything. I could edit the tuning but I doubt I could do better than the manufacturer.

Funnily enough I quite enjoy fiddling with PID loops, a leftover from my University days when we were instructed/ commanded to fiddle with them...and tested on the
results! Truth is that you can usually find much better things to do with your time though.

I second your positive comment about Warp9 Tech support. I'm guessing that Andy is pretty much the chief cook and bottle washer which explains why development
is so slow/erratic. There are just too many support calls for him to concentrate on development. Nonetheless I am impressed by the support.

Craig

5357

General Mach Discussion / Re: Nmotion Controller

« on: February 08, 2018, 01:41:50 AM »

Hi pstenabaugh,
where abouts on the globe do you hail from?

Craig

5358

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: M6 Doesn't work...

« on: February 08, 2018, 01:35:44 AM »

Hi,
I haven't really studied the code but I can see that certain parts of it are wrong and will not work. As I posted earlier it is not permissible to have multiple
GcodeExecutWait() statements one after another. I don't know why, I have a guess, but lets not complicate the issue with trying to discern the inner workings
of Lua.

As an example, this section:

Code: [Select]

mc.mcCntlGcodeExecuteWait(inst,"G90 G53 G00 Z0.000")
    mc.mcCntlGcodeExecuteWait(inst,"G90 G53 G00 X25.000")
    mc.mcCntlGcodeExecuteWait(inst,"G90 G53 G00 Y352.500")
    mc.mcCntlGcodeExecuteWait(inst,"G90 G53 G00 Z"..probestart)
    mc.mcCntlGcodeExecuteWait(inst,"G91 G31 Z-60 F100")

will need to be written:

Code: [Select]

mc.mcCntlGcodeExecuteWait(inst,'g90 g53 g0 z0.0\n
                                      g53 x25\n
                                      g53 y325.5\n
                                      g53 z'..probestart\n..
                                      'g91 g31 z-60 f100')

As you can see I've reduced all of the GcodeExecuteWait() statements to just one by concatenating all the original lines with a '\n', linefeed character.
There are some simplifications that I have made also.
G90 is modal and need not be on every line whereas G53 is not modal and MUST be on every line that you wish it to apply. Likewise G00 is modal and need not be mentioned
on every line although it does no harm. There are some modal commands where that is not the case.
The last thing, that I have used all lowercase...why?. Machs Gcode interpreter when it parses the Gcode presented to it converts all letters to lowercase and also strips
out the leading zero. Thus G00 becomes g0. Under most circumstances Windows is fairly tolerant and no fault is generated but not always. Thus when I code I now
use lowercase without leading zeros and have avoided a few traps. What you choose to do is up to you.

Craig

5359

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Mach 4 Goto Zero

« on: February 08, 2018, 01:07:25 AM »

Hi,
I'm not sure that identifying either missing or corrupt Lua code is going to be easy....particularly as you are learning and its very easy to overlook a seeming
innocuous detail which may in fact have a major influence on Mach.

One possibility is to use the Lua scripts. I presume the vast majority of the two Lua scripts will be the same, they were both generated from the same standard Mach profile.
If you compared the two scripts, the one good one you now have and the dodgy one you might find it. To compare them manually could be done but probably
time consuming.

I could imagine writing some code to do a text compare or maybe there is a feature like text compare in one of the text programs.

Craig

5360

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Real G93 Gcode anyone

« on: February 07, 2018, 09:02:34 PM »

Hi,
Hobby cannot do custom B but Industrial can.

Craig