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Customization Options
« on: April 03, 2013, 12:45:55 PM »
I'm kind of new to Mach 3 and confused about customization, add-ons, etc., and I hope someone here can help. 

Thus far I have encountered the following, which it seems all offer ways to alter the behavior of Mach 3 (or maybe only Mach 2?):

Brains, plugins, macros, wizards, add-ons,  VBScript commands, and Cypress Basic all seem to be programmable; there are also screensets, and modification of keycodes.

In addition there is a development wiki and an SDK. 

Can anyone tell me which of these are currently used/maintained, and what their different purposes are?

Offline Hood

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Re: Customization Options
« Reply #1 on: April 03, 2013, 01:51:30 PM »
Brains are user defined and can be for many things, for example you may wish to look at an input and if its seen do some function. For example a simple one may be you make a brain to look at Input 1 and if its seen then have it press the cycle start in Mach.


plugins are used by external devices, mainly motion controllers such as smoothstepper, csmio, galil etc

macros are either standard or custom, for example the spindlespeed macro or m3 macro are standard macros, you can however edit them to suit your own needs. You can also make custom macros so that when you call that custom mcode the macro will be executed. Custom macros should be named m101.m1s and upwards. For example you may have a macro that you want to use to turn off an output, if you named it m101.m1s and stored it in the macro folder of the profile you are using then each time you called m101 from G Code or MDI line that macro would be executed and the output would be turned off.

In addition there is the macropump, there can only be one but you can have different things within it. The difference between a macro and the macropump is that the macropump is constantly being looked at and if any of the conditions you have in it are met it will do whatever you have told it to do.

VBScript/Cypress Basic are more or less the same thing, its actually cypress that Mach uses for macros etc but it is often referred to VB.

WIKI is just a place for information, you may for example find information there on how to write a macro.

Development, depends what exactly you are meaning but likely it is in reference to the Mach download. All that means is its a version that has some bugs fixed but it may not be stable so only use if you are willing to test.

SDK is the tools for people to write plugins for their external devices.

Hood


« Last Edit: April 03, 2013, 01:53:17 PM by Hood »

Offline khalid

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Re: Customization Options
« Reply #2 on: April 12, 2013, 02:08:16 PM »
nice explanation Hood. Thank you i learn something today.