Professional machinist GUI

cmorley wrote:

DRO is the axis position read out ( Digital Read Out is a manual machine term)
I was going to ask if having Absolute,relative and DTG on screen all the time is wanted. (I see most of the FANUC screens do)

TOUCHY has a (IMHO) non intuitive way to use a touch screen without a keyboard for MDI. Once you know it I'm sure it's good. I found it annoying to figure out. A visual keyboard is much better.

Personally I feel some real switches are a must - I want an override selection switch - I like the tactile feedback of the click and you don't have to look at it at all and you know what setting your at.
ESTOP,cycle start, feedhold probably too. (Keep in mind i only ran an early 80's Okuma Lathe)

We have to remember we are talking about a linuxcnc control screen that CNC operators are comfortable with not what us computer guys like.
We can't stray too far from the current machine controls they use.

Luckily we have choices so Andy can have his extra feedback and the operators can have the cleaner screen.
Gscreen is very customizable so this should not be a big problem - just lotsa work
At the moment I must figure out how to get 'onboard' to work nicely and have a common (for operators) layout.
Ubuntu 8.04 doesn't have onboard AFAIK.
10.04 does but it seems to have problem with keypress repeating. EDIT - it seems fine when you actually use a touchscreen.
12.04 does and it seems to work well but linuxcnc does run on 12.04 yet.

And Gscreen doesn't run on the 2.5 release....

Chris M

Position feed back is very important, LinuxCNC does not support absolute encoder feedback yet. On the Fanuc control absolute encoders are are the "Machine" position and there is a process for setting that up. These machines dont have real limit switches. They use the absolute encoder for machine position. On the Linux CNC control a realtive position that can be zeroed out and a machine or absoulte position should be shown in almost if not every screen.

I have no love for touchy's MDI capibility it is very painful to use.

Real switches can be added to a conversion if needed. As long as they are there in the touch screen. I was talking to one of our long time machineset yesterday and he feels that the Haas control is better than the Fanuc. The Haas control only has ESTOP, Cycle Start, Feed hold and the Jog wheel. Plus all its buttons are physical chicklet style. Which could be made touch screen buttons.


Will it run on 2.6 or 2.4?

BigJohnT wrote:

cmorley wrote:

Luckily we have choices so Andy can have his extra feedback and the operators can have the cleaner screen.
Gscreen is very customizable so this should not be a big problem - just lotsa work
At the moment I must figure out how to get 'onboard' to work nicely and have a common (for operators) layout.
Ubuntu 8.04 doesn't have onboard AFAIK.
10.04 does but it seems to have problem with keypress repeating. EDIT - it seems fine when you actually use a touchscreen.
12.04 does and it seems to work well but linuxcnc does run on 12.04 yet.

And Gscreen doesn't run on the 2.5 release....

Chris M

While I have onboard up all the time on my BP I think using a dialog box like I did for number inputs would be a better choice for anything except writing a program.

John

You can have both correct? Pop up full keyboard for code editing and MDI. Pop up number pad for entering numbers only like feed/speed overrides.

BigJohnT wrote:

tjamscad wrote:

You can have both correct? Pop up full keyboard for code editing and MDI. Pop up number pad for entering numbers only like feed/speed overrides.

I assume so, I was talking about using a Glade dialog box like I did for the number entry, not the onboard thing.

John

For a number only entry "Glade dialog box" that sould be fine. Can you point me in the direction of what you are reffering to?

BigJohnT wrote:

A screen shot of the demo is in this thread .

Basically you touch or click in the entry box and the keyboard pops up. You can see what your about to enter and make corrections and if I get fancy it could do calculations. Once your happy with the number you hit save and the number is sent to the entry box that called the keyboard. Also the sign key toggles the sign even if you have numbers or not.

John

That sounds like it we be nice defently with calculations.

I added more photos plus.google.com/photos/10704930871463576.../5818585863458903217 it shows what the screens are giving you when options are selected

EDIT: fixed link

The link gives an error.


Gscreen has a Calculator widget that comes up if you click or double click the entry box.
If you just type digits then apply it transfers them to the entry box.

Though I don't see why the onboard keyboard can't be set up for similar duties.
The Onboard layout is configurable just not super friendly to do

Chris M