Messages

7251

Mach4 General Discussion / Multiple controllers/devices

« on: January 05, 2017, 06:33:04 AM »

Hi All,
is it possible to have more than one motion controller active at once? I had assumed not but in truth don't know.

Looking at the Mach config for both inputs and outputs it looks like you can have different devices active for different I/Os.
Is this correct?

Craig

7252

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Lua

« on: January 05, 2017, 06:06:32 AM »

Hi,
just had a look at the PoKeys 57 manual, pretty impressive.

From what I can gather you can have a total of 55 inputs or outputs, less one for each analogue input and less two
for every encoder. Haven't quite worked out how the digitised data gets communicated yet but guess its via Modbus registers.

If you can have more than one motion controller active you'll be fine.

Craig

7253

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Lua

« on: January 05, 2017, 05:38:10 AM »

Hi Craig,
to my knowledge Mach4 can have one motion controller active at a time. I'm a very recent convert to M4 so what I say
is far from gospel. If I'm correct then a simple in/out pin pair arrangement won't work with ESS.

I am unfamiliar with the PoKeys board but sounds like your best bet particularly if it has analogue inputs.

Mach4 has plenty of in/out but you have to squeeze it thru your motion controller, I think that's going to be your
bottleneck.

Craig

7254

General Mach Discussion / Re: Kress FME-1050-1 + Inverter?

« on: January 05, 2017, 05:10:46 AM »

Hi,
correct me if I'm wrong but aren't Kress universal motors, ie wound armature/brushes and wound stator?

Inverters that you are talking about are 3 phase output for induction machines, different animal.

Craig

7255

General Mach Discussion / Re: AIRCRAFT PROPELLER

« on: January 05, 2017, 05:04:58 AM »

Hi,
yeah really nice job. I use 22's and 24's on a 94cc chainsaw engine, they scare the hell out of me at 9000rpm...


Craig

7256

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Lua

« on: January 05, 2017, 04:44:43 AM »

Hi Craig,
I live in New Zealand.

That's a pretty impressive control panel, without any multiplexing I got to 27 inputs without counting the MPGs or Overrides.

I would be having a close look at the number of input/output pairs you require. I to use the ESS and it has three ports. Lets assume
that the motors, limits and homes use one port, leaving two still to be assigned. Assume also that you configure pins 2-9 on both
ports as inputs for a total of 26 inputs (2-9+10-13+15 times 2) and 8 outputs (1+14+16-17 times 2). Without multiplexing not enuf.

The overrides as you have shown them are analogue so will have to be converted to digital signals and even as serial inputs will
require 1 pin per override without multiplexing. MPGs require two pins each.

I think you either have to rationalise your control panel or do some sort of MODBUS arrangement. Depends on what you want to do,
if your hobby is tinkering with electronics and software go MODBUS or similar, if you want to make things with your machine then
shagging around with MODBUS is going delay proceedings bigtime.

Craig

7257

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: re-mapping motors and home switch inputs through lua script

« on: January 05, 2017, 03:20:34 AM »

Hi smurph,
that's describes exactly what I see happening... thanks for the explanation. While I might have floundered around
for a bit I've learnt stuff on the way, good fun.

Having a bit of trouble with:
mc.mcGoCookMeSteakand Eggs()
maybe in the next build...LOL

Craig

7258

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Lua

« on: January 05, 2017, 03:05:48 AM »

Hi Craig,
how many buttons does your control panel have?

If its a reasonable number say 5 or less then the simplest way would be to assign 5 pins as input to Mach and
assign 5 pins as outputs from Mach to turn on the lights. I'm not familiar with your controller but would guess you
have enuf inputs/outputs

There are more complicated ways (MODBUS) to do it where you can have dozens of inputs/outputs if you need them.

Craig

7259

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: Lua

« on: January 05, 2017, 01:15:32 AM »

Hi Craig,
I'm a newcomer to LUA myself and like you really struggled initially. While by no means fluent I'm getting there. Having got over
the hump I now find LUA to be superb.

API=Application Program Interface
mc.=Mach Core

LUA like all computer languages have variables which you can manipulate in any number of ways. For LUA to be useful to us we
need to be able to make it do things to our machine. Mach provides a whole bunch of functions which allow you to do that, collectively
called the API. On the 'Program Run' page with 'File Ops' in the lower notebook with Mach enabled there is a 'Help Docs?' button and in
there 'Mach4CoreAPI.chm' provides the complete list, aside from other manuals and lists. Its quite daunting to look at to start with.

Take a simple one to start with:
inst=mc.mcGetInstance()

The mc. means 'a function within Mach Core' and the function is mcGetInstance. Sometimes the mc. is referred to as a namespace
There are others and some I have a lot of trouble with for instance wx.  It refers to wxWidgets functions which are  graphical windows,
message boxes, dialogues and that sort of thing. Another one which crops up a lot is scr.  It addresses screen elements like buttons and LEDs.
While the Mach Core API is well documented some of the others are not, scr. for instance. wx. on the other hand is superbly documented
because it is so widely used by so many different languages, the downside is its so complete I can't usually make much sense of it, it takes
some serious 'nerdiness' to read.

I've found particularly with wx. I copy/edit examples of whats already been written, setting up frames, panels and event handlers from scratch
is not easy.

For basic LUA stuff I often have
https://www.lua.org/pil/contents.html
open on the desktop so I can dip into it at need.

The good news tho is that unless you have a particular need for something that you probably don't really need to write any code to convert
a machine, Mach4 is pretty complete for milling machines. Additionally if you do want something the chances are that someone has probably
got something pretty close you can copy/edit. There are some regular contributors, Daz-The-Gaz especially who is VERY well versed in LUA and
really goes out of his way to help newcomers.

Craig

7260

Mach4 General Discussion / Re: mcCntlGetGcodeFileName ...Crashes M4

« on: January 03, 2017, 10:09:27 PM »

Hi smurph,
tried that out and it works exactly as you said it would. The gcode probe job is constructed/written by another program
which calls my macros M40() and M41() and so that's how I named them.

Following your post I renamed them m40() and m41() and the job ran fine or even calling from the MDI line.

Still thinking about filenames. I record the path and filename of the probe job in a register with:
mc.mcRegSetValueString(hreg,pathCode); ie as its not read by the interpreter the string stored retains both
upper and lowercase of the original filename. At the end of the probe job m41() is called which among other things
opens the gcode file with:
   local pathCode=mc.mcRegGetValueString(hreg);
   local hcode=assert(io.open(pathCode,"r")); ie LUA is searching for a file. Would it succeed on a Windows platform if the
filename was correct but all in lowercase say?

I guess I can try it to see!

At the current time I believe M4 only runs on Windows platforms. Is it realistic to believe that it will run on other platforms
in the near future?

Craig