Zero axis with handwheel (w/o WCS) possible?

I recently bought one of those WHB04 handwheels and took the opportunity
to finally upgrade to 2.8, because almost everything seemed to be preconfigured.

I never ever touched any HAL files in the last two decades and managed to
keep things running by googling and browsing through this forum, but I'm
really stuck here and would appreciate any help.

Like every sane person, I usually use coordinate systems for any offsets
and I already managed to "program" the handwheel to do exactly that.
One machine though, a very big wood portal machine, cannot use WCSs
and also does not even have any limit switches.

What I need and failed to achieve is to somehow map the "home" or
"zero axis" function (the one usually executed by simply pressing the "home/pos1"
key) to the handwheel. My old control had keyboard support, so I could
simply map one of the keys to this functionality.

For this one here; close, but no cigar:

This just results in a "not possible in MDI mode" error.

Is there any way to achieve this? Mapping the function of the
"Home/Pos1" key to the handwheel? With halui? Or any of the other UIs?
A script or whatever?

Any ideas welcome.


Thanks
AS
 

andypugh wrote:

I think that the halui.joint.selected.home pin is meant to start the homing sequence. Not much good without home switches.
 

If "HOME_SEARCH_VEL" is set to 0, the axis values just becomes 0 without moving anything,
as far as I know. But I might be wrong and would love to try this.

How can I execute this command? The error I get is that this cannot be executed
in MDI mode. Tried several thing to leave it, but I don't understand much if not to
say basically nothing of the LinuxCNC internals.
 

Oh yes, I learned about this a couple of days ago and this is exactly
what I managed to set up (but don't want to do).

How about this one here:
linuxcnc.org/docs/2.8/html/man/man1/sendkeys.1.html

Your name's on that one, so you probably know it very well
Can this be somehow triggered from a handwheel?
 

Ok, I quickly learned some HAL and figured it out.
In case anyone needs to zero the axes with this WHB04 thingy, here's how:



Might not be the best way, but considering that I did not understand a single HAL
command or instruction two days ago - it's probably not too bad.

The stuff above also take into account that the default or proposed code,
from the WHB04 manual page, has this line here, which needs to be deactivated: