Is it possible to run LinuxCNC 100% console?

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06 Jan 2015 20:06 #54652 by NeoTech
What im after is running the GUI as console app instead of a point and click application.

Why would someone ask, and its because i will not use the control computer as the main workstation. So i would rather need a stdio/stdout feed of data from the application.
So i can either connect to it using a remote interface or wrap the process in a stdio/stdout watcher that exposes the feed of data to a multiplexer application allowing for a
pure tcp connection thats then exposed to a remote client over either websocket or some other realtime protocole like webrtc.

How would it work, i would prob. wrap linuxcnc as a childprocess of a node.js application or similar high performance streaming framework. And then just row by row interpretation
of the data streaming it as TCP datastream to a secondary server software with a client part that works in the webbrowser for start.
The asynchrounous nature of node.js makes it more suitable then say Python for similar task and would not impact the host system performance wise as much.

Oh well im digging into the linuxcnc system more and more and realizing i can utilize my background as a software engineer for stock trading systems and applications. =)

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06 Jan 2015 21:05 #54656 by andypugh

Why would someone ask, and its because i will not use the control computer as the main workstation.


That doesn't really answer the "why?" for me.

The Machinekit (LinuxCNC fork, www.machinekit.io ) guys are tending to use this sort of setup because they like the Beaglebone, but the Beaglebone doesn't have the GPU to run a GUI well.

My answer to that problem is "don't use a Beaglebone then"

I tend to do all the CAD / CAM indoors on my Mac, then send the G-code to the LinuxCNC machine to run it. I occasionally VNC to the LinuxCNC machines to watch what they are doing, but only occasionally.

(All I really need is some sort of network broadcast "job finished" to happen)

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06 Jan 2015 21:16 #54657 by NeoTech
Well, that would be possible to i imagine. Either if you just need a simple signaling system for done or not or if you want a lightweight monitor, or run a gui off of a cellphone and so on.
I find the axis gui clunky and the other ones not that user friendly.

Sure you could remote in with vnc or run a X11 application server and just have the app on your desktop while it runs on the server. But well i just want to be able to build upon a faster stack
rather than having to rely on Python a language i refuse to relearn ever again.

The machinekit solution is not really solving it either actually, tried it out last night (and i found it quite unstable). And you can still not really hook into the stdio of the application. And exposed stdio with a streaming stack would
promote a different approach on how to develope UIs - maybe more userfriendly for one and easier to expand on rather than having to get into GTK and Python.

And well while some people think what exists is enough. Some other might wanna tinker.. I personally like to tinker. ;)
I'm figuring that linuxcnc can run multiple UI's so it would be possible to hook into that someway.. *fiddling*

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