Please Help - How to Configure a 5 Axis Head-Head

Aciera
Oh yep, duh. Missed that. Was working on this late last night.  Will fix the joint numbering and axis naming per your suggestion now. Thank you. I am also going to delete W axis.  

I generated code for the B and C axis by copying the data for A axis that was generated from pncconf, just like you said.  The reason B axis is listed first is because thats how we were doing it when we were using bridgemill.  Have not copied any code from any other configuration. 

@tommy & rodw

No worries. You guys are both kind of right.
Generally additional joints can be added in this way no problem, as I pointed out above. But with custom kinematics and vismach models one has to be careful not to mess up the joint-axes mapping because that is often hard coded in the respective files.

The screen resolution is 1366 x 768.

Yess I've heard of what you are talking about, there is an option for tilted workplane in most post processors.  So, it seems like this configuration that you are making right now can work purely as TCP or can work with the tilted workplane output (which I would assume TOOL is more your 3+2 kind of machining vs full 5 axis?).  So in theory, this machine could work with either type of post processor. 

I see the code.  So TCP and TOOL are using Machine code.  M428 and M430 respectively? 

Nutating is where one of the axis is tilted at 45 degrees? I had an idea for a machine that may use that from all this discussion.  I may make another post about it...

I modified the code as you suggested Aciera and am still getting the same error when I try to launch on LCNC.  Maybe it is something to do with editing in Visual Studio and/or some kind of copy/paste error. Or some other mistake that I made. I will go through the code with a more fine tooth comb, but I will add the new code and the error I am getting for reference here. I don't know what it means by ' ' as a command...  I did relaunch my test config and it still connects to and moves the machine, so it is not a connection issue. 

Note: I moved the axis around so they are now oriented to work with the new xyzab_srt kins file. Because of the way I wired Mesa, the pin number and joint number are the same per axis. The .ini file is set to use xyzab_srt as the kins file, the joint number is 6, xyzabc. 

Tommy-

VS Code (visual studio code) doesn't put unknown characters in like word processors do.

It's my preferred editor for gcode, HAL, INI, and anything else LCNC related.  There are also free gcode & HAL plugins available which highlight various characters and so forth to make it easier to read & edit.

there is a program (you may need to install with apt) called dos2unix
run your files through it just in case there are spurious CRLF pairs in your file as it will remove them.

Lol, yeah I would be surprised if VS caused issues, but I have been using LibreOffice to do some editing on the laptop, so maybe that introduced some errors. Spumco, do you know if VS has a debug built in that I could use? I have downloaded the LinuxCNC extension but cannot get it to run debug.  I am new to VS code. 

Rodw, okay is dos2unix something I should install on the linux laptop and run through terminal? 
 

Got it moving! Not sure what the problem was, but I created yet another config (for some reason I cannot use pncconf to modify an existing file all though you are supposed to be able to. It throws up an error when I try to click past "external controls".  Anyone know how to fix this?) then more carefully edited things.  Never got the weird ' ' error and worked my way through the other bugs.  Now XYZAB are working, I'm going to go add C now. 

For future reference, it may very well have been LibreOffice causing the issue, I was careful not to use it.  Though I am using VS code. 

Kins is still on trivkins, but hopefully we can get xyzabc_srt kins working tomorrow or soon!

Edit: Looks like I got the C axis in there too.  I don't actually have the C axis fully assembled yet, so I don't have anything plugged into C and can't see if it's moving, but it shows up in axis gui. 

Edit2: I tried switching the kins file to xyzab_srt just for sh*ts and giggles and it threw up an error.  I'm sure theres more to it then just switching the kins file name, but I am going to add a picture of the error code anyway.