Schaublin 125-CNC retrofit.

Hi Andy,

I got the Schaublin updated to Trixie and 2.9.8.

I really like the update you did to the look and button layout of Lathe macros. Thanks.

I was trying to work out how to address not having any feedback on the turret arriving in position. Because I am a shit programmer, I tried Chat GPT yesterday.

 

This is the set of requirements I gave:

 

The AI summary is rather accurate.

 

 

After a couple of back and forth, adding requirements, and accepting some AI suggestions, the result is the attached files.
Scary good how fast and efficient this is for a small project with very limited requirements, and how well it documents and explains the code. It would have taken me a few evening to get to this level, and my code would have been a mess of half-arsed work-around to avoid the gaping holes in my programming knowledge.

It failed to compile yesterday, due to some unknown character. I suspect the apple text editor has added some hidden ascii code. The attached files I cut paste into a different text editor. Off to test them now.
Cheers,
Mark

Okay, now I am understanding the pain of AI. I went in circles with compiling errors and format.

Now it compiles, but I get
hal:turret:1: character unknown '  '
and the invisible character search didn't turn up anything.

Any ideas what I have wrong in this comp appreciated...

I asked my imaganiry AI friend to take a look at it thusly:

"A friend of mine is trying to get a custom linuxcnc HAL component up and running and he's getting an odd runtime error of "hal:turret:1: character unknown ' '"

The documentation for hal stuff is here:http://linuxcnc.org/docs/html/hal/comp.html take a look and see if you see anything out of place."

While sending the comp file along.
The replies seem pretty reasonable:



I see two issues:

1. The actual error (line 1) — almost certainly smart quotes

The "character unknown ' '" error on line 1 means the halcompile lexer is hitting a byte it doesn't recognize. Line 1 has a doc string:

component turret "4-position pneumatic...";

Those " " quotes are probably Unicode smart/curly quotes (U+201C/U+201D) instead of plain ASCII double quotes (U+0022). Super common when the file was written or pasted through a rich text editor, Google Docs, macOS Notes, Word, etc.

Fix: Have him run this to check:

cat -A turret.comp | head -1

If he sees M-bM-^@M-^\ or any multi-byte sequences where the quotes are, that's the culprit. Replace all smart quotes with plain ASCII " quotes. Quick fix:

sed -i 's/[\xe2\x80\x9c\xe2\x80\x9d]/"/g' turret.comp

2. Secondary bug — FUNCTION name mismatch

He declared function _; (underscore = unnamed/default) but then used FUNCTION(turret) in the C section. Those have to match. Should be either:

FUNCTION(_) {

Or better yet since it's a single-function component, just skip the FUNCTION() wrapper entirely and put bare C after ;; — like the ddt example in the docs.

3. Minor — int diff inside switch/case

case 0:
...
int diff = target - position;

Declaring a variable inside a case without braces can choke some C standards. Wrap it:

case 0: {
...
int diff = target - position;
...
break;
}

The smart quotes are almost guaranteed to be the "character unknown" error. The FUNCTION mismatch will bite him right after he fixes that.