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Touch Screen Monitor with M4
« on: January 11, 2020, 08:22:09 PM »
Running M4 on Lenovo with Windows 7 Pro 64 and its fine.  Anyone either running a touch screen large screen size monitor OR a stand alone all in one computer touch screen setup? Suggestions or links to Threads already that have it covered.
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Re: Touch Screen Monitor with M4
« Reply #1 on: January 25, 2020, 08:12:08 PM »
Hi,

Yep I am running it on a 22" touch screen. I attached it to an Intel NUC. It can actually be considered an AIO solution as the NUC can be screwed directly to the VESA mount. It runs fine with windows 10. However it is a little annoying to use the virtual keyboard of windows 10 as Mach4 does not play nicely with it. The keyboard is always occluding large chunks of Mach4 so you have to open/drag/close it constantly. Although besides for MDI you should not need a virtual keyboard as you can enable a virtual numpad  for all numeric input fields in Mach4. However you must enable it for every single input field yourself.

Touch gestures are not supported either. And in the default screensets some buttons are too small for touch, so be ready to fix that yourself in the screen editor.

However the team is working on better touch support:

Feature Request: Better touch support

Larger touch screens are cheap these days and spares you from installing a keyboard/mouse. However Mach4 does not play well with touch.
1. It would be nice to be able to pan and scan the gcode viewer with touch gestures.
2. A default touchscreen friendly screenset would be nice. (larger buttons, virtual keyboard etc)

Maybe a setting that makes Mach4 not use the lower third of the screen so that there is enough space for a virtual keyboard. Or maybe it would be better to add a virtual keyboard in mach4 directly so that it pops up whenever we can type something (eg MDI gcodes)

My Matsuura MC-500V conversion uses a touch screen and it works perfectly.  So I don't know what you mean about Mach not playing well with touch screens.  We do NOT currently support gestures, if that is what you mean.  However, I can scroll the G code list by simply using the slider on the list. 

We are working on gesture support now.  It will be a while though because of other priorities. 

We already have popup screen keypads and keyboards.  You have to enable them on the controls you want.  Look for the "Editor" property in the properties of the controls when in the screen editor.  Then make sure "DRO Auto Calc" is checked in the Operator menu in the menu bar.  The MDI control is an exception at the moment.  I use an industrial keyboard for all of that. 

Making a default touchscreen screen set is probably not going to happen.  Because nobody will like it and it will not be to their satisfaction.  Luckily, we gave you the ability to roll your own!  :) 

Steve

best regards

Brandon

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Re: Touch Screen Monitor with M4
« Reply #2 on: February 02, 2020, 05:32:09 PM »
This MDI has an alpha keypad now since a while.  Mult-iline input even.  Try a development version from the FTP site.

Steve