Pressbrake CNC Control Setup Questions

The backstop and the tweak were a bit of a punt, but I wanted to show how to handle a bit more complexity.

It's prpbably best to define your "wish list" early in the process, and maybe sketch out some GUI designs as you would like them, rather than how you know how to make them in Glade.

Should the bar go down to depth and stay there, or auto-retract a little once at-depth?
Pause at depth?
The state machine should probably have some timeouts and/or overload "escapes"

I got strangely interested in this. I have made a fairly complete press-brake config based on my old gui.



Unzip the archive somewhere on your HD. Probably linuxcnc/configs/Bender
You will need to install the press.comp You probably have to make "bender" and "pressgui" executable: You can then start the demo with The idea is that the system runs through the bend sequence in the table. If you press the "down" button in the sim-pin then the Vismach bender will run down to the start position, then slow down, then to the finish position. If you then release the down-button you have the choice of going down 0.1mm further, or pressing the up button. Once the brake is back at the top and idle the system moves on to the next row.
Things that I gave up on for the moment
1) File save / open etc.
It's mainly intended as a basic skeleton for your real machine.

As set up here, the ./bender command leaves an interactive hal session open in the terminal. "exit" will close that, and close the GUI, Vismach and button panel.
But I left it in so that it is easy to open a halmeter and watch things / explore the HAL pins, etc.

I fiddled some more. I have added a backstop and addressed the issue with there being no feedback of the active row.

I have also re-arranged the UI layout.

Re-download the ZIP file for the new version. There are also changes to the press.comp, that will need to be re-installed.

Still no file save / load though. But I am looking at it.

OK, and now load / save / saveas / quit work.

(re-uploaded the zip file)

I will stop now, awaiting feedback from someone who has at least used a press brake.

What would be useful? "dublicate bend" button?

Once you are going up, you can't go down again. Is that OK?

Please play with the simulator and see how it feels.

I think that there is plenty of scope for cosmetic improvement too.

OK, I got your simulator installed and working. Looks Great!

Now my next step is to get it to work with my machine. I've been trying to get the press.comp to work in axis gui, but just can't get it going. Might be with my encoder, pwm, pid settings. I'll attach my hal file. I had the ram jogging before with keyboard y jog.

How do I merge my settings with your program?
Do I use an ini file?
Where do I keep the pid settings?