Retrofitting a 1986 Maho MH400E

Hello, nice video. The statement in the video that you are going to ruin a good machine with the retrofit to linuxcnc or mach3 comes from people that use these machines every day in their work, from their perspective they have right, even a very successful retrofit like yours probably can not stand in a shop floor. Even with an old mazatrol a skilled machinist can make in minutes the program without cad-cam and run the jobs all day very efficient pressing the minimum number of buttons. With oily fingers and tight deadlines they can not use touch screen to jog the machine.
But those people have also wrong because the machine now belongs to an amateur and this machine must give satisfaction to the owner. The interface of mach3 and linuxcnc is more pleasant and easy to learn than a old controller designed to be extremely productive with trained employs.

Great video, made it sound so easy,do I detect a hint of Kiwi accent ?

Just measured up my garage.....no room for Maho

drimaropoylos wrote: Even with an old mazatrol a skilled machinist can make in minutes the program without cad-cam and run the jobs all day very efficient pressing the minimum number of buttons. With oily fingers and tight deadlines they can not use touch screen to jog the machine.

I'm not so sure this applies today so much. With the right touch screen, oily fingers and gloves are not an impediment. But they cost way more than a home user is prepared to spend.

The other thing is we probably don't need skilled machinists so much as skilled programmers. The unfortunate fact is that technology continues to deskill our workforce in every industry. Remember when map reading was a required skill to get around? Today we leave it to our phone to guide us to the destination.

I think Norbert has done a really outstanding job with Gmoccapy.
<Rant> I see a number of efforts to do "new" "better" screens, but they all look focused on eye candy and copying the latest color trends, rather than workflow. Rather than loading up a 21" touch screen with zillion tiny functional buttons, Gmoccapy is a really well sorted workflow, gouping functions as you logically use them, while remaining uncluttered </rant>

I took advantage of the HAL pins Gmoccapy generates to duplicate the on screen soft keys with physical soft keys, and made the pendant, for exactly the reasons drimaropoylos stated, because touch screen jobing for touch off gets old really fast. That I haven't finished installing the pendant is on me not on LinuxCNC though. Once the pendant is installed, I won't be touching the screen much at all.

I get what you say about the experienced machinist being able to make a program on the machine without CAD/CAM. The Phillips 432 had a good reputation for that. I see in myself when I just want to square up stock, or drill some holes etc, there in no reason to fire up CAD/CAM but line by line in the MDI I make too many mistakes. So mostly I write a short G code program using loops. I kind of hope that NativeCAM duplicates the simple part programming functionality of many legacy system, as you point out, and more, but also haven't got off my backside to implement it yet. It would be interesting to hear from a machinist with Mazatrol, or Phillip 432 etc experience who has also implemented and learnt NativeCam.

In hindsight, my attempt to make the interface keyboardless was a mistake. Typing code on at the touch screen keyboard is not pleasant. I use a cheap USB keyboard plugged in more often than not. It would have been better to have butchered the original user module with an industrial keyboard, and better, 15" monitor (this 17" one is shite). Not sure I'd add a whole lot of additional single function buttons, as they are really well thought out on Gmoccapys soft keys, and I have physical buttons for them.

Otherwise, the only thing I can see in the argument that a retrofit can't hack it on the shop floor is quality of wiring, shielding etc. (I am not going to pretend mine is good enough). I see no reason to doubt the reliablity of the MESA hardware. Maybe a better protected MoBo with a better quality, shock mounted hard drive would also be a good idea.

Have to totally agree with your assessment of some of the newer screens. Another thing that isn’t taken into account is on screen button size vs finger size of someone who has spent all their working life using their hands.
Another argument I see is that Linuxcnc user interfaces look dated. I don’t know if it’s just me but I spend more time with my eyes on the machine rather than the GUI.
As for your conversion, I really like the way you took advantage of the modularity of the control electrics, rather than a wholesale rebuild. If , heaven forbid, anything has a major gremlin a repair should be easier.
Mind tho my opinions are just those of a hobbyist my background is carpentry & roadwork labouring.

Its interesting to hear your thoughts on Gmoccapy using it to control a mill which is what its intended for. Whilst I liked it at the beginning on my plasma machine, there are issues I don't like now. I use a 17" wide format (16:9) touch screen.
Home all requires 2 button presses to achieve. Its mandatory on a gantry machine.
Home buttons too far away from the power on switches. (diagonally opposite corners), should be close together as we have to always home when turning on the machine
File name display as icons makes it very hard to read longer file names. Files should be sorted in date order
Too many tabs, forever swapping between them to reach jogging, keyboard macros on MDI and the file run tab.

When you get your pendant going you will find you need to select the jog screen for it to be active.I got tired of this when you were on the other side of the table so I programmed a pendant button to select the jog mode/tab. But then when you have finished jogging, you need to reselect the run tab or MDI tab which requires a trip back to the console.

It is much nicer on a 4:3 monitor and often I don't bother with full screen mode.
So in summary, I'd like to see a Mk2 with support for 16:9 screens that uses the extra real estate to provide a single flat interface with more ergonomic button placement and better file name display with a custom touch enabled file name display in a single list with search and navigation buttons.

I have a Windows based touch screen NC controller for my press brake and its data entry is quite OK. The use of the onboard keyboard by gmocappy is very kludgy in my view.

Ooops, I ranted too!