Hurco Hawk 5M Retrofit w/ existing motors

There are always pitfalls, even on the right track.

But this sounds like a reasonably conventional retrofit.

Thanks a lot, guys for laying eyes on my thread here and weighing in on it. I went ahead and ordered the mesa cards, they are a week out. I'm just going to work on building me a custom ui for the machine in the mean time. I had thought about going with the Path Pilot interface but I think I'd rather build up my own based around axis. I've been reading through the pyvcp portion of the documentation and it's all very straightforward. I'd really just like to add tabs to the existing set of tabs in axis instead of creating a new est of tabs. I don't see this mentioned in the documentation or maybe I just missed it. Is there an easy way o do this?

I really want to add tabs for a tool table, work offsets and probing.

Yes, you can add PyVCP or GladeVCP panels as tabs in most of the UIs.

linuxcnc.org/docs/2.7/html/gui/gladevcp....ladevcp:embeding-tab

With PyVCP I thought that you could use:
linuxcnc.org/docs/2.7/html/gui/pyvcp.html#_stand_alone
With the EMBED_TAB command in the INI the docs seem to say that this is only for GladeVCP
linuxcnc.org/docs/2.7/html/config/ini-co...tml#_display_section

Glade is a lot more powerful than PyVCP anyway, I would advocate using it.

Also look at Gscreen, a GUI _designed_ to be customised.
linuxcnc.org/docs/2.7/html/gui/gscreen.html

Thank for the fast reply and tip, I'll look into Gscreen and then Glade.

Okay well, I'm officially an idiot. I went through the process of designing my entire ui just to have it not load. I can load it with gladevcp from the command line but there are tabs missing when I do it this way. I went back to the page you reference and worked through the little example that they give to make sure I didn't miss something. Problem is that it won't load either. It gives me two errors, the first:

Gscreen encountered an error. The following information may be useful in troubleshooting:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/gscreen", line 1345, in on_feed_hold_changed
self.widgets.hal_toggleaction_pause.set_active(h["feed-hold"])
File "/usr/bin/gscreen", line 185, in __getattr__
if r is None: raise AttributeError, "No widget %r" % attr
AttributeError: No widget 'hal_toggleaction_pause'

and the second:

Gscreen encountered an error. The following information may be useful in troubleshooting:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/gscreen", line 3688, in <module>
app = Gscreen()
File "/usr/bin/gscreen", line 723, in __init__
self.initialize_widgets()
File "/usr/bin/gscreen", line 829, in initialize_widgets
self.init_dynamic_tabs()
File "/usr/bin/gscreen", line 901, in init_dynamic_tabs
self.set_dynamic_tabs()
File "/usr/bin/gscreen", line 2892, in set_dynamic_tabs
nb = self.widgets[name]
File "/usr/bin/gscreen", line 189, in __getitem__
if r is None: raise IndexError, "No widget %r" % attr
IndexError: No widget 'vcp_box'

Any ideas? I know its something silly that I over looked.

Can you attach the ui file?

(And what type did you save the UI file as?)