gantrykins shenanigans

I have a plasma table that I converted over from Torchmate control (that system sucked) to LinuxCNC with a Mesa 5i25/7i76 and dual motors on the gantry (X-axis).

I have gantrykins set up correctly (as far as I know). Homing and jogging, in joint mode work as expected. However, when jogging in world mode, the machine will jog right past the soft limits (while popping up an error in axis) until they hit the actual limit switch. In joint mode the joint will stop jogging when it get to the limit.

Is there a way to make gantrykins actually obey the limits set in the .ini file?

Actually, I'm now running the ja3 branch with gentrivkins so now the jogging obeys the axis limits. It also doesn't drop me into joint mode everytime I run a hal command button from a pyvcp. So, now JohnT's plasma sheet align subroutines work a lot easier.

The only problem I'm having now is that using my gamepad to jog doesn't work anymore sending the analog signal from the gamepad to halui.jog.0.analog will only jog that joint, not the other X-axis motor (joint 3).

I tried changing the gamepad hal stuff so that the input analog signal goes to halui.jog.0.analog and halui.jog.3.analog, but not only does this ignore the axis limits, but after a bit of jogging, the two joints will get out of sync and pushing any buttons, clicking anything, trying to run a program, or go to MDI mode will cause a folowwing error to pop up.

Now I'm looking for somewhere to connect the analog signals from the gamepad that will work with the kinematics.

Damn straight.....

I've pretty much got it figured out...

Turns out that even gentrivkins will drop into joint mode at the drop of a hat, just like gantrykins, it just doesn't change the axis display to show the joint numbers. Also the gamepad input going to halui.jog.0.analog will, in fact, jog the slaved joint 3 as well while obeying limits, but only in teleop/world mode. When you jog with the keyboard axis will automatically switch to wolrd mode before the motion starts, so you never notice when the machine drops to joint mode. However, jogging with the halui pins, does not set world mode before trying to move, causing the following errors on the slaved gantry.

What I've done is to have some and2 components that disable the halui jogging (set jog speed to 0) unles the machine is on, in manual mode, and in teleop mode. I also have the right shoulder button on the gamepad connected to halui.mode.teleop which must be pressed (but not held) and the machine not in mdi mode or running a program before the buttons/sticks on the gamepad will cause motion. This is actually a good thing since I no longer require any of the X, Y, A, or B buttons to be held in order to jog like in the simple pendant guide on the wiki.

I also have the X, Y, A, and B buttons set up to run some modified versions of the sheet alignment subroutines. The A button starts the alignment process and zeros the program to the current position. Then the operator (not me, on this machine) can jog to any point along the bottom edge of the sheet (not quite parallel to the x axis) and press the X button to apply the rotation to the coordinate system. The same can be done with the other edge to align along the Y-axis by pressing the Y button. After the program is run, pressing the B button will remove the rotational offset.

Also, on the gampad, the start button is set to run the program, the middle "Logitech" button pauses, and the back button will stop the program. After a program is run, the left shoulder button calls a MDI command to send the machine off to a safe position for loading material.

The Torchmate control couldn't even dream of being this cool.

P.S. I actually understand HAL files now...