A axis and pendent

I am doing a bit of work with A-axis and I think a long time ago the cut preview displayed A axis movement. It went away after some upgrade. I just upgraded to 2.4.0. I saw a reverence to GEOMETRY=XYZA and thought that might be related but doesn't seem to be. So how to I see A axis movement on the screen?


I really need a pendent for jogging. Where can I find a suitable USB device? Will the Tormach shuttle jog controller work?
Thanks a lot.
chuck

Take a look here,
wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emcinfo.pl?Simple_Remote_Pendant
wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emcinfo.pl?Add...imple_Remote_Pendant

You need to look at the geometry, in theory with XYZA the A axis rotates on the Z axis (like the spindle spinning and therefore you cannot see movement. Any AXIS listed after A would rotate and be shown on the screen moving. You need to change the geometry.

Rick G

I read the integrators manual and it is not clear to me what geometry statement to use for a 4 axis mill. My next question is why isn't the geometry statement automatically generated by stepconf when it creates the .ini file? Should I rerun stepconf?
This is what I have. Generated long ago.
[TRAJ]
AXES = 4
COORDINATES = X Y Z A
MAX_ANGULAR_VELOCITY = 30.30
DEFAULT_ANGULAR_VELOCITY = 3.03
LINEAR_UNITS = inch
ANGULAR_UNITS = degree
CYCLE_TIME = 0.010
DEFAULT_VELOCITY = 0.10
MAX_LINEAR_VELOCITY = 1.00


Thanks for this info on pendants. I was looking for something simple. Looks like I will have to dig deeper.

chuck

There is a great section on kinematics in the EMC2 Integrator manual. You also might try playing with the 9 axis sample files supplied with EMC and modifying them.

I read the kinematics section and frankly don't understand it and I don't see any discussion on how to set GEOMETRY.

Someone stated that the rotary axis needs to follow the linear axis that it rotates about. ( I don't know how they deduce this from the documents) This would imply that A should follow X so I tried GEOMETRY=XAYZ which created an odd preview.

I reran stepconf and the new .ini file did not have a GEOMETRY statement even though it created a 4 axis file. It would seem to me that there should be some kind of default.

BTW, I am running EMC 2.4.0