Hello Everyone,

I am trying to find a way to send Mach 3 or Mach4 (Im Flexible) MDI commands threw a serial interface.

I have searched the forums but mostly find results for modbus.

Any ideas will be very much appreciated.

Thank You

-Adam

Hi,
I'm not sure is the short answer.

The longer answer is I think its possible.

If you sent a text string corresponding to a Gcode line then Mach could execute that
line by line.

If using M3 then something like:

while(true)
   gcodeLine=(a text string from serial input device)
   if(gcodeline !='EOF')then
         code(gcodeLine)
   else
          break
   end
end

Please not my VB skill is absolute rubbish and the chances of that working as is nill but
the idea should work.

I have only recently bought a licence for Mach4 so can't say for sure that this will work
but there is a 'serial plugin' in M4 which sounds rather hopeful for what you wish to achieve.

Loop
Get some serial data from the plugin;
construct a Gcode line from that data;
mc.mcCntlGcodeExecute(inst,yourGcodeLine)
end loop.

The Lua scripting language in Mach4 is a bit baffling to start with but its ultimate flexibility
and power exceeds VB. If you're going to write scripts and so on I think Lua is where you
should invest the effort. Certainly that was the conclusion I came to. Whereas Mach3 is good
Mach4 is shaping up to being brilliant.

Craig

Why do you need tp do MDI (Manual Data Input) by Serial interface?

Mach3 was not designed to use a Serial input format.