Gscreen - a GTK / Glade / Python based screen

Norbert

I like the screens and I see you have built nice custom icons.
I am not a fan of sliders myself though.
Is this for a touchscreen?

I suggest a separate thread if you have lots of questions and to showcase your design!

Chris M

I think I have a acceptable substitute for tabs and have built an alarm page with time stamps.

system tab is not password protected yet....

Chris M

cmorley wrote:

I think I have a acceptable substitute for tabs and have built an alarm page with time stamps.

system tab is not password protected yet....

Chris M

Great, the alarm history doesnt seem to show history.

Can you remove the toggle button in the bottom right corner since you have the tabs working correct.

Spindle speed does not increase the readout when using the + - to increase the speed.

On the status block: Try moving "SO", "FO" and "VO" side by side and then putting the Jog line below that and on the bottom put the Coolant mist/flood side by side

"coordinate System" the "C" is lowercase

Sugest moving the Run tab to after the tool edit tab

Sugest renaming "RUN" tab to "Program"

From "RUN" delete "Next Tab" button

Sugest adding title to Spindle area

Spindle light does not turn on when spindle should be running

Thanks for the comments to the layout.

Yes, the screen is designed for touch screens, I am testing on an Faytech 17" witch are able to run at 1280 x 1024. The actual design is for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768. I am thinking about staying with the 4:3 dimensions or change it to 16:9.

I was not thinking about opening a new thread, I wan't to rebuild my screen to an gscreen custom screen.
May be I can document my work a little bit, so it can be useful for others.

I will mantain you informed.

Chris, why don't you like sliders?
and may I contacted you by PN, if I got special questions?
Opening an own thread is to early in my opinion.

Regards Norbert

newbynobi wrote:

Thanks for the comments to the layout.

I was not thinking about opening a new thread, I wan't to rebuild my screen to an gscreen custom screen.
May be I can document my work a little bit, so it can be useful for others.

I will mantain you informed.

Chris, why don't you like sliders?
and may I contacted you by PN, if I got special questions?
Opening an own thread is to early in my opinion.

Regards Norbert

Sorry Norbert I thought you wanted to use Gscreen's backend to display your screen.
Yes documenting your process is a nice way for others to learn. The wiki is a good place to rough out your documents development I find.
yes keep in touch - I am interested in what others are doing screen wise.

I don't like sliders because I find them a pain to adjust when I want an exact rate.
They are fine for showing status, but I prefer real dials or buttons to set rates - but this is me and what I was used to when I ran a CNC lathe.
feel free to contact me PN - I hope I can help.

Chris M

tjamscad wrote:

cmorley wrote:

I think I have a acceptable substitute for tabs and have built an alarm page with time stamps.

system tab is not password protected yet....

Chris M

Great, the alarm history doesnt seem to show history.

Can you remove the toggle button in the bottom right corner since you have the tabs working correct.

Spindle speed does not increase the readout when using the + - to increase the speed.

On the status block: Try moving "SO", "FO" and "VO" side by side and then putting the Jog line below that and on the bottom put the Coolant mist/flood side by side

"coordinate System" the "C" is lowercase

Sugest moving the Run tab to after the tool edit tab

Sugest renaming "RUN" tab to "Program"

From "RUN" delete "Next Tab" button

Sugest adding title to Spindle area

Spindle light does not turn on when spindle should be running

The alarm history will only show history since started, it doesn't save it from session to session - that could be added.
It records anything that is printed to the status line except the 'ready for homing'
for a sample go to run tab and press start spindle you get a warning and that warning will be recorded in the alarm history.

I will remove the toggle button and next tab button

The spindle speed and spindle at speed indicators are not working because I didn't hook them up in the sample HAL file.
The spindle speed bar is actually feedback from linuxcnc the little red line is the requested rpm.
I will see about connecting it so you can see it work.

I will try the status changes and fix the missing capital.
and the rest of suggestions sound find too.

Chris M

Chris,

Great progress!!

After using it on the mill a bit I have some comments --
1. The number buttons on the spindle preset popup are too small to use on our touchscreen, unless we click with the trackball. The same is true of the popup keyboard and touchoff popup. Could these buttons be made larger? Also, it doesn't show the value entered as the buttons are pressed. The value only shows up when the entry field is clicked. On the mill I noticed the value is quite slow to update after pressing a couple of number buttons.
2. If the spindle was started, then the speed adjusted, then stopped. Next time it is started, could it use the same speed as when it was last stopped in the current session? Would help for starting/stopping when using an edge finder when touching off the work.
3. We have a hardware "Start Cycle" pushbutton wired to a hal pin. If I enter an MDI command into Gscreen, could this hal input be used to execute the MDI command? This is not a big deal, but we're used to it since touchy does this.
4. Our gscreen.ini file specifies the columns to be used by the tool editor, like this:
TOOL_EDITOR = tooledit Z DIAM
This gives an error when pressing the Tooleditor button, as if it's trying to spawn the editor using "tooledit Z DIAM" as the program, not as the tooledit program with arguments.
5. Could the current spindle speed (selected with the +/- buttons) be shown somewhere near the display of actual speed? I know the red line shows it, but could the RPM number be shown as well?

This is really coming along Chris. Great work. Thanks a lot!!!

Karl

karlkec wrote:

Chris,

Great progress!!

After using it on the mill a bit I have some comments --
1. The number buttons on the spindle preset popup are too small to use on our touchscreen, unless we click with the trackball. The same is true of the popup keyboard and touchoff popup. Could these buttons be made larger? Also, it doesn't show the value entered as the buttons are pressed. The value only shows up when the entry field is clicked. On the mill I noticed the value is quite slow to update after pressing a couple of number buttons.
2. If the spindle was started, then the speed adjusted, then stopped. Next time it is started, could it use the same speed as when it was last stopped in the current session? Would help for starting/stopping when using an edge finder when touching off the work.
3. We have a hardware "Start Cycle" pushbutton wired to a hal pin. If I enter an MDI command into Gscreen, could this hal input be used to execute the MDI command? This is not a big deal, but we're used to it since touchy does this.
4. Our gscreen.ini file specifies the columns to be used by the tool editor, like this:
TOOL_EDITOR = tooledit Z DIAM
This gives an error when pressing the Tooleditor button, as if it's trying to spawn the editor using "tooledit Z DIAM" as the program, not as the tooledit program with arguments.
5. Could the current spindle speed (selected with the +/- buttons) be shown somewhere near the display of actual speed? I know the red line shows it, but could the RPM number be shown as well?

This is really coming along Chris. Great work. Thanks a lot!!!

Karl

Karl thanks for the realworld feedback.

1) I can make the buttons larger on the number buttons - it may be a little while as its a separate widget to fix.
The pop up key board's size should be able to be change by dragging the corners - the keys should get larger too. It will remember this size the next time its popped up.
The numbers not updating or being slow is from the fact the computer is running out of time to do the userspace tasks, I find this on my test machine (1Mhz and onboard video). The debug text screen sometimes doesn't update either.
I just tested reducing the screen update from 50 milliseconds to 100 and the numbers updated properly and the rest of the screen seemed fine. I will make this change permanent.

2) I'll tell you the idea about spindle adjustments. The preset key (just under the start/stop key) is for that purpose. but as you found out using the +- keys
doesn't adjust this preset number. I could make it do that. I'm just not sure if that would be just as annoying when you want the preset to always be the same and just want to tweak with the +- keys. What do others think???

3) I'm sure we could do that. Do you want it just for MDI or do you want it for program cycle start too? I'll look into it

4) that does sound like a bug. I'll look into it nut just wondering why you don't use gscreen's tooleditor?

5) The current (feedback) spindle speed is displayed as a bar and as a digital number as long as you connect the HAL pin.
Is this what you want or do you want an digital readout of the commanded (requested) speed (which is what the red line represents)

Chris M

cmorley wrote:

1) I can make the buttons larger on the number buttons - it may be a little while as its a separate widget to fix.
The pop up key board's size should be able to be change by dragging the corners - the keys should get larger too. It will remember this size the next time its popped up.
The numbers not updating or being slow is from the fact the computer is running out of time to do the userspace tasks, I find this on my test machine (1Mhz and onboard video). The debug text screen sometimes doesn't update either.
I just tested reducing the screen update from 50 milliseconds to 100 and the numbers updated properly and the rest of the screen seemed fine. I will make this change permanent.

2) I'll tell you the idea about spindle adjustments. The preset key (just under the start/stop key) is for that purpose. but as you found out using the +- keys
doesn't adjust this preset number. I could make it do that. I'm just not sure if that would be just as annoying when you want the preset to always be the same and just want to tweak with the +- keys. What do others think???

3) I'm sure we could do that. Do you want it just for MDI or do you want it for program cycle start too? I'll look into it

4) that does sound like a bug. I'll look into it nut just wondering why you don't use gscreen's tooleditor?

5) The current (feedback) spindle speed is displayed as a bar and as a digital number as long as you connect the HAL pin.
Is this what you want or do you want an digital readout of the commanded (requested) speed (which is what the red line represents)

Chris M

3. It would be good if it could execute the MDI command and start the program. I haven't tried it, but can this be done by sending the button to halui.program.run?
4. I'm probably confused. I thought the entry in the ini file was required, to limit the number of tool editor columns to just the active ones. Not so?
5. I was thinking of a digital indication of the commanded speed. Partly my request for this is a bit odd, because we have a noisy spindle encoder and it's hard to know with any certainty what the commanded speed is from just the feedback speed. Let's see if others might want this too.

You can't run MDI with halui's run pin AFAIK

No If you have a very current Gscreen it automatically adjusts the columns to what in the INI file [TRAJECTORY] coordinates = X,Y,Z etc
there is also a unrelated command to load another tooleditor from the INI under [DISPLAY] TOOL_EDITOR = tooledit

5) Sounds to me that you need to filter your spindle feedback. The commanded speed is displayed in the active codes display when running a program. i might be able to have both speeds displayed in the bar display.....

Chris M