Arduino based USB Pendant for Linuxcnc

You guys see the new Arduino? They are a pendant waiting to happen.

arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardEsplora

Awesome post, I would love to have a quadrature rotary encoder linked to a 4DSystems touchscreen for a pendant, the touchscreen being the buttons and also displaying position.

The touchscreen has a microcontroller on board that communicates with the outside world using using serial.

My issue is I am new to linuxcnc, can only do very basic programming and so I am wondering if me trying to do this is feasible?

Thanks

Richard

Hi.
i think it is much easier than that
Why do you want an pendant with touchscreen ?

I do have an lcd for my info and have a lot of buttons fro jog start stop pause and so on
and an quadrature encoder for jogging itself
so i dont know what the lcd should be good for
if you think of haveing all your display as touchsscreen it is also possible
and the pendant is the quadrature only that is ou of the box
thomas

Touchscreen is fashionable.

Dear ArcEye!

You Have done a Great Job but i need a little Help from Your side.

I am a Near 50 year old millmen with poor english knowlege and no idea of Coding. My best friend is the Leodic ^^

i have Build your Pendant and want to run it but i find no way where i should put the

ArcEye wrote:

serialcon.comp

I Have Done "sudo apt-get install linuxcnc-dev"
I have given the missing moduls of arduino in the library

but where i must i put the comp with directory does you mean?

i have try to read the manual hal component generator but i dont find a way to place them
where must i put a code to start the component

my first attempt wars verry unusefull so i have to reinstall Linuxcnc i crash't them complete

please can you give a little help to get them run

thank you and have a good day
Franz

Hi

Copy the file serialcon.comp to your config folder for the machine using the pendant. Could be anywhere but that is most logical.

In a terminal cd to that config directory and use the command
sudo comp --install serialcon.comp

That will build the userspace module and copy it to /usr/bin, for your type of install

The line loadusr -W serialcon goes in your postgui.hal file normally and then you join up the pins as required, as per the previous posts

regards

Hi

Just an update.

I have been using my pendant quite a lot recently.
I upgraded my big mill to Mesa 5i25 / 7i76 cards and hard wired the pendant I used to have connected to a parport card, into the 7i76 encoder and IO interfaces.

This means that on my small mill, which shares the same computer, I now have no other pendant option.

I have re-written some of the code.

The polling rate is increased to every 10th of a second and the baud rate increased to 115200

There is now a check on the data received and the LCD display is only updated when it differs from the previous data.

The jogging logic is slightly changed.
After selecting the jog velocity and enabling jog, a press on a direction arrow jogs until the button is pressed again, or the jog enable button is pressed.
The velocity can be changed mid jog without stopping, useful when you are nearing the target and want accuracy.

Overall the pendant is much more responsive and the display is rock steady.

I have zipped up the new code, the versions of the arduino libraries I used for keypad, LCD and serial ( because they have changed) and a config folder that runs a sim which interacts with the pendant.

Instructions for building and changing the code to match your particular arduino / jog increment requirements etc. remain the same as per earlier posts

regards

Arceye,
I have a toolchanger board driven by an Arduino (nano) and I want to modify your serialcon2 component in order to send tool requests to the Arduino and receive tool change completed signal from the Arduino over USB. However I cannot get the component to build. I have the Linuxcnc-dev stuff installed but I do not have the "comp" program in order to put it my config directory and build it. I did do the other instructions I found on the net which is to put the .comp file into /linuxcnc-dev/src/hal/components/ and then make. But I get a failure that stdlib.h isn't found:

tom@EMCO-120P:~/linuxcnc-dev/src$ make
Reading 183/183 dependency files
Done reading dependencies
Creating serialcon2.mak
Reading 183/183 dependency files
Done reading dependencies
Preprocessing serialcon2.comp
MAKEFLAGS="" \
/usr/bin/python modsilent.py make KBUILD_EXTRA_SYMBOLS=/usr/realtime-3.4-9-rtai-686-pae/modules/Module.symvers -C /usr/src/linux-headers-3.4-9-rtai-686-pae SUBDIRS=`pwd` CC=gcc V=0 modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-3.4-9-rtai-686-pae'
CC [M] /home/tom/linuxcnc-dev/src/objects/hal/components/serialcon2.o
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-3.4-9-rtai-686-pae'
/home/tom/linuxcnc-dev/src/objects/hal/components/serialcon2.c:30:20: fatal error: stdlib.h: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.
make[4]: *** [/home/tom/linuxcnc-dev/src/objects/hal/components/serialcon2.o] Error 1
make[3]: *** [_module_/home/tom/linuxcnc-dev/src] Error 2
make[2]: *** [sub-make] Error 2
make[1]: *** [all] Error 2
make: *** [modules] Error 2

I re-ran ./configure just to be sure it could find things, and I can see /usr/include/stdlib.h exists but no luck. I also tried to edit the .comp file and make the include line: #include </usr/include/stdlib.h> which I know is ugly, and that still failed with the error above. What am I missing?

EDIT: I am building this on 2.7~pre6 on Debian Wheezy.

Thanks,
Tom

andypugh wrote:

tome wrote:

I do not have the "comp" program in order to put it my config directory and build it.

Try "halcompile" we changed the name of "comp" because that had a name-clash with something else, and was popping up a really bad bit of advice.

Andy, Thanks that works!