Jogging with hal commands only

andypugh wrote:

Typically your pendant would send its own opinion of which axis to jog

yeah, thanks to chris breaking it down for me above, thats the approach i decided to take and it just makes more sense.

andypugh wrote:

Then it is just simple HAL connections.

Which for some reason nobody wants to come out and actually tell which ones ACTUALLY move the machine. Its like a secret masonic handshake or something. but no mind, i believe that i have cracked the esoterica that is hal by literally going through the hal pins and systematically changing every value until i made the machine move.

actually it is not as bad as all that because using the documentation i narrowed it down, but seriously it was blind luck that made it work because had the hal pins not been alphabetized, i would never have stumbled on the proper sequence.

andypugh wrote:

...and also the current MPG jog counts.

and about that. i found 4 methods of jogging during my experimentation, but the axisui method is out because that violates my desire for gui agnosticism as well as jogging joints, there might be a reason for that with some machines, but in my experience that is BAD BAD BAD! now of the remaining methods, i could jog continuously, incrementally, and absolutely. what would be your advice for the three? how would you handle the continuous jog? maybe a momentary button or possibly a thumb stick? and i noticed with absolute jogging, that starts from the current machine position. does the pendant keep the value and is there a way to reset this?

thanks,
dexter

we made our own MPG arduino based via serial
and also a reload component that gets it all fixed if the connection gets off


there is a project follow in the german section

I kinda think you are going about this the wrong way. It not really any different to adding a jog wheel which can all be done in Hal. There is an example in the docs about how to add an MPG.

You select the axis, set the scale (distance per jog step) and send Hal the MPG pulses. It converts them to a count and the axis moves a distance of scale * count. You don't need to track anything.

There is another worked example including the hardware I used to do this on a Mesa 7i76e on about page 3 of my spaceship plasma build thread

rodw wrote:

There is an example in the docs about how to add an MPG.

Iooked over that example, but it wasnt quite what i was looking for. that was more for a hardware/rt solution, and what im doing is slightly different in that its all done in software.

rodw wrote:

You select the axis, set the scale (distance per jog step) and send Hal the MPG pulses. It converts them to a count and the axis moves a distance of scale * count.

that is EXACTLY what im trying to do, but for some reason i cant seem to get a straight answer as to WHICH pins exactly do the jogging, and since linuxcnc has a couple of different methods that work, which one is the best. I know what i want it to do and everyone has told me what to do (which are pretty much one and the same) but for some reason, nobody will tell me HOW to do it! thats all i wanted to know... that would have been much more efficient than the week i have spent trying to get the machine to jog, but i did get a better handle of how the hal is organized and some interesting pins!

rodw wrote:

You don't need to track anything.

Thank you! thats what i needed to know.

pl7i92 wrote:

we made our own MPG arduino based via serial
and also a reload component that gets it all fixed if the connection gets off

interesting, i would like to see how you approached the serial connection and how you got the com to keep from bogging down the buffer. is there a link?

its just a python adon

pl7i92 wrote:

its just a python adon

i went and looked at it and it seems to just keep the connection active. what happens when it accidentally gets disconnected or something. usually if usb connection is lost and port is open, then it is connected using the next number, eg. ttyusb1 etc. it looks like it binds on usb0, is there a way to bind it by name or id?