LOVING the PMC!! Thanks Steve!!!

Scott

+1 on the PMC love!!!!!!!

I'm glad you guys like it! 

  Everybody who used brains but wanted them to be better and easier to use should be singing your praises right now.
I can't wait to get my BTC-1 changed over to Mach4. Because of the PMC, I can do it without learning how to code all of my brains in LUA.
The PMC will allow me to do my toolchanger integration as well. It is so nice to be able to make a change without having to delete all the rungs below it.

PMC PMC PMC PMC PMC PMC
Thanks again Steve.

OK...what is a PMC?

Programmable Machine Controller.  It is a Fanuc term.  Basically, it is a ladder logic editor that spits out LUA code behind the scenes.  VERY fast.  It can be used instead of the regular Mach mapping of I/O or in conjunction with it.

The pros of the Mach I/O mapping is that it is event driven.  The PMC runs at a defined timer interval, thus is not event driven.  However, I did try to improve on that a bit at least for the Mach output signals.  When any of them fire, I force a PMC cycle.  So the PMC is basically event driven for the Mach output signals only.  Otherwise, it runs on a cycle just like any other PLC type of thing.  But...  you can have insane timer intervals (depending on the PC hardware).  I run my PMC object at 20ms intervals which is about the finest resolution my Atom board will do with a timer.  They complete their cycles in less that 1ms.  My real PC can handle 10ms intervals.  The OS seems to be a limitation on timers as well because 10 ms is about the finest resolution I can get.  But still!  10ms!!  That is smoking.

Steve

Steve

This has actually made me think about looking at  Mach4 again, took me long enough to get the basics of VB for what I needed and screwed if I was going to learn Lua to do the the basics in Mach4.
 I am not a programmer and don't want to be, I just want to be able to get my machine working like I want and use it without having to be multilingual.

I have always liked ladder logic, it is natural to me and PMC, at first glance, seems to make having to learn Lua redundant, hope I am right

Always wanted ladder logic for Mach3 but Brian doesn't seem to like it, he is a programmer and they are weird, looks like some are only half weird though

Hood

I assume you used LDmicro's Ladder Program, apparently that is the program that was 'ported' over.

i can't locate any examples from LDmicro , if there are any, i could sure use them.

Very nice job. I noticed that LDmicro has a 'make persistent'  instruction, can this be added in the future ? .

Congrats on nice addition.

We did start with LDMicro.  However, it was purely for the GUI as a starting point.  To keep from having to re-invent that wheel.  However, the GUI was cleaned up a bit (looks nicer without all of the dashed lines) and I added some nice features to make paralleling circuits easier, among other things.  The back end guts were completely re-written for generating LUA code. 

Some things that were in LDMicro just are not applicable to the Mach/LUA environment.  Persistence can be done with Mach registers in the Regfile plugin.  Then just use the PMC to operate on those registers that you define as persistent. 

Just in case anyone is wondering, we did license the LDMicro code, so the GPL stuff does not apply.  We paid the author handsomely.    We will have to sell a LOT of Mach licenses to get a return on the investment.  However, we consider it a win/win as we got the PMC a lot quicker that we would have otherwise and we like supporting guys that make cool software. 

Steve

Thank You!!!!! For the PMC! Now I can the ATC going on my big old Fadal !!!!