Like I said, this is a test before I make my real screen.

I just found out that this is going to be trickier than I thought. Putting transparent buttons over LED's doesn't always work as expected. Looks like it may take a tricky balancing act of "Bitmaps to back", and Cut and "Paste in Place".

What kind of problems are you having with the transparent buttons?
One thing I found out is that Mach doesn't like a Persistent Image Button. I had to recreate all the buttons on each screen so that they were unique to each screen.
You wrote in an earlier post that you work at the 1024 resolution in screen4. Do you then scale it up to the higher resolution? Do you scale things down in the lower resolution. It sounds like a lot of work.
I designed all mine at the 1280 res. It was a pain.
Andy

Yeah, I found out early the persistent buttons didn't work.

Here's what's happening. The X axis DRO lablel/ zero button is actually an LED with two states, so that it turns a glowing green when ref'd. On top of the LED, is a transparent button using a transparent .png.

When I start Mach, I can home the X axis and the LED turns green. Then I click on it to zero the DRO, and I see the blue LED state on top of the green LED state. ( I can see the green glow around the edges.)

However, if I go to View >Load screens and reload it, it'll work correctly after that. Weird. Even weirder is that the run button is the same way, but is working OK.

Do you know if Bitmaps to back only affect the selected bitmap, or all of them? It seems like if I select the background image, and do a bitmaps to back, it actually moves the background to the back, but only on that screen. on the second screen, it moves the buttons to the back 

I think I need to load the backgrounds, then the LED images, then transparent buttons.


Wait, I think I have it figured out. The screen I've been playing with didn't have the transparent .png loaded for the transparent button.

Here's what seems to work. Follow the instructions I just mentioned, then, select the transparent button, then Edit>Cut and Edit>Paste Exact. Then right click and lock in place.  Then it seems to work correctly. the buttons with LED's under them don't "depress" like the others, but they do change colors like i want.

Another thing that's tricky is making the dual state LED's, where one has a glow. Sizing is critical so they don't jump left or right by a pixel or two when changing state. Sometimes cropping from the edges can fix it, but sometimes I need to move the button by 1 pixel in Photoshop to get the spacing right.

Almost filled up.

It looks like a nice screenset. Now finish it so you can go back to work on your router.
BTW...5 years seems like a long time to build a machine
I built mine last winter. It was a fun build. I never really needed a router but I wanted one. I've done more work for my friends with it than for myself.
Here is a youtube video of it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZC8v0UnWdM
Andy

Does anyone want to try it? No built in wizards, and the Offset buttons, and Goto zero, to go, machine coords and softlimits don't work. But it's somewhat functional.

Can anyone tel me how "Reverse" works. I set it up like the standard screen, but I can't get it to do anything.

And Run From Here? How does that work? Set Next Line does what I'd think run from here would do???

Put the .png's in  Mach3\Bitmaps\R2 and load R2.set

Feedback appreciated.

Vacuum Button is set to Output #5.

Home All buttons don't work, and Reset on Run screen doesn't work either. oops.

I'll give it a try if I have time this afternoon Gerry.
 If you select  "run from here" the machine immediately takes off from the current line in the Gcode window. "Set next line" just queues it up. Then you will need to hit the run/start button. The reverse button is probably most useful for plasma machines. It will trace back over the toolpath in the opposite direction. I modified my Goto Zero button to only affect the x and y. I don't like the idea of my machine rapiding down to the top of the stock. Makes my butt pucker....
Andy

No guinea pigs??

The FRO label/button is an LED that changes when FRO is active. I wanted to duplicate this functionality with the spindle override. Unfortunately, there doen't appear to be a spindle override LED.
Here's my workaround:

Create a user LED for spindle override, and create a Brain that toggles the LED if spindle override is less than 100%. (OEM DRO 74) ( I have the spindle override set to 50%-100%). I believe that if you wanted more than 100% override, a second Brain (or Lobe??) could handle this as well.

One thing I noticed, though, is that I need to use an S word in the initialization string to make sure the spindle speed is not "too slow for pulley" when Mach3 starts. I haven't tried with the pulley min set to 0, but that might work. The S in the initialization seems to work fine.

Question is, is there somewhere else that spindle speed is specified when Mach starts? I'm using OEM DRO 202 for the spindle speed.

PS. These images are full size screen captures with Mach3 running at 1280x1024, so you can see that it looks pretty good.