Hello Dave, I am running the trial version of the MSM with intent to purchase a pro license.  Wanted to test it out before committing.  So far I'm very impressed with the probing section.  The probing caused a lot of grief with other screens.
One issue I ran into is the fly out panel with 10x7 screen.  I have a 17" monitor with 1440x900 resolution so I have plenty of space horizontally.  I can stretch the window horizontally to be able to see full window and the fly out panel at the same time but when switching between the windows the fly out panel disappears.  I would like to use 12x9 screen set but I can only see the top of the window buttons if I pull up the whole window as much as possible (unable to switch between windows)  I guess I'm 50 pixels too short  .
So the question: is there a way to prevent fly out panel from disappearing?

I have few other comments but I'll try to post about those later.

Thank you

Hi,

I'm afraid that we don't have a way to make the fly out panel "stick" when pages are changed.
That action is controlled internal to mach and there isn't an interface for MSM to use to ask mach to "pin the fly out" open.
BTW - this action will be the same for either 10x or 12x9 resolutions - since it is mach's action, it is also what happens for all bitmap screen sets.

FYI - This idea has been requested by a couple of people, and I've suggested it to Brian and he said he would consider doing it.

Dave

Dave, the main reason for me is to be able to change the FRO or Speed-overwrite quickly with a mouse click without opening the fly out window.

Couple of little comments I have about MSM.
I usually set WCO with probe before I load the file or do anyhing else really.  When you go to WCO / probing, there isn't a place to change the tool to the number that probe is assigned to, I have to go to a touchoff tab to change the tool number.  It would be more convenient to have the tool number change on the probing page as well.
The other thing is the tooling numbers.  I set tools manually on the machine for each job.  It would be nice if there were - + buttons next to the current tool field so that you can just click the buttons to increase/decrease tool number (like there is for tool viewer)
Lastly, sometimes I get lost and need to ref an axis or all axis when setting up tools, it would be nice to have a button on the tooling page at least for z axis ref.

Please excuse me if I missed something.

Hi,

Dave, the main reason for me is to be able to change the FRO or Speed-overwrite quickly with a mouse click without opening the fly out window.

I understand the desire - there are trade-offs which had to be made due to the limited space available on a 10x7 screen. In the 12x9 resolution, the overrides are on in the run page.
And while no one will believe it today - when the MSM design was done, wide screen format monitors were much more expensive than the 4:3 aspect monitors - so the design goal was 4:3 rather than 16:9. 

Couple of little comments I have about MSM.
I usually set WCO with probe before I load the file or do anything else really.  When you go to WCO / probing, there isn't a place to change the tool to the number that probe is assigned to, I have to go to a touchoff tab to change the tool number.  It would be more convenient to have the tool number change on the probing page as well.

I bet you are changing the current tool by typing a value into the current tool DRO. That's actually not the best practice - in fact, If I could disable that use of the current tool DRO, I would do so. FYI, I'm told that DRO will not allow that action in Mach v4. Doing things that way causes some technical problems that I'll spare you the details of.

The base problem is that is just changes the "current tool # inside mach w/o doing any of the other actions that a tool change could/should do. For example none of the MSM Tool Change option code will be run as no Tool change sequence gets started... that can blow up a part program if it was expecting all the tool change actions to happen (for example a tool to get measured as part of the tool change) but they didn't get done.

During the MSM design phase, Brian wanted the model to be that all tool changes would be done via GCode - this gives a consistent result internal to mach.

I suggest that you try to break yourself of the habit of changing the current Tool DRO value, and instead get in the habit of doing T# M6 in the MDI control - which is the recommended "best practice".

This also resolves the issue of needing the "tool # DRO" - as the MDI line is on all the primary pages. 

The other thing is the tooling numbers.  I set tools manually on the machine for each job.  It would be nice if there were - + buttons next to the current tool field so that you can just click the buttons to increase/decrease tool number (like there is for tool viewer)

Again - if you do tool changes via T#M6 in MDI, this becomes moot.

Lastly, sometimes I get lost and need to ref an axis or all axis when setting up tools, it would be nice to have a button on the tooling page at least for z axis ref.

There are separate ref buttons for each axis on the run page.
The design was to keep the tooling page for tooling - and referencing axes was not viewed as strictly a tool operation. I realize that referencing impacts other things, and in some sense everything interacts with everything else 


Dave