A Widescreen Blender-Style Interface

A little more progress, this time on bool state buttons. Each state button can be set to either toggle a value, or set it On or Off. They can be specified as an option button, which permits applying different appearances (i.e. blue background when checked instead of green). They track the linuxcnc state, and are disabled if the action can not be performed. They can also be used in a menu, and have shortcut keys assigned to them. In that roll they look very much like the menu actions in Axis.



Cheers,
Kurt

kcj wrote:

A little more progress, this time on bool action buttons. Each action button can be set to either toggle a value, or set it On or Off. They can be specified as an option button, which permits applying different appearances (i.e. blue background when checked instead of green). They track the linuxcnc state, and are disabled if the action can not be performed. They can also be used in a menu, and have shortcut keys assigned to them. In that roll they look very much like the menu actions in Axis.

Cheers,
Kurt

Looking saweet!!!

Can it be set up so it's just a flood and mist button which would cancel one about it if pressed? Ie, both in off state,
press flood to turn on, and pressed again it turns off, press again it turns on, press mist, mist turns on while flood is turned off.

Lcvette wrote:

Can it be set up so it's just a flood and mist button which would cancel one about it if pressed? Ie, both in off state,
press flood to turn on, and pressed again it turns off, press again it turns on, press mist, mist turns on while flood is turned off.

That was kinda my thought too. A combined button/LED which is red with text "Mist OFF" when in the off state. When you Press it, it turns green and says "Mist ON". That would save a lot of screen real estate. 3 buttons folded into 1.

rodw wrote:

Lcvette wrote:

Can it be set up so it's just a flood and mist button which would cancel one about it if pressed? Ie, both in off state,
press flood to turn on, and pressed again it turns off, press again it turns on, press mist, mist turns on while flood is turned off.

That was kinda my thought too. A combined button/LED which is red with text "Mist OFF" when in the off state. When you Press it, it turns green and says "Mist ON". That would save a lot of screen real estate. 3 buttons folded into 1.

I like that they turn green when active, or blue.. a mist button and a flood button I think is plenty, simple and clean and easy to understand. And like to said, safe a ton of screen space.

I will be roughing out the plug-in menu, next, as well, as touching up the probe menu.

A appreciate a willingness to help, and I have indeed given many people input on the interface. I have worked to accommodate people's requests. I have given credit where credit is due. I have been fair. Though, in the end, this is my proposal to make to LinuxCNC.

After the rest of the menus are laid out, the graphics are uploaded, everyone may work on it as you wish, as you likely can now.

Generally, I have had a horrible time elsewhere on these forums. I will not have it in a thread I started to try to give something back to the community.

I ask you, please let me finish this thing before everyone works to change it.

I will offer you another way of looking at it, and you may ask yourself this after reading this post, but if you do not trust my judgment, why are you here? What drew you to this thread?

My goal here, was to offer a interface design largely bridging the gap between between Axis and Gmoccapy, with elements of Hazzy and Touchy--all in the tried and true style of Blender. The resulting interface will have compromises. Many of the computers people run LinuxCNC are compromises. The interface is going to require a 1920 x 1080 widescreen monitor, but other than that I wanted to be respectful with people's machines.

I want to be respectful of just how much programming it will or would take get this thing working. And so, the first iteration isn't going to have all the bells and whistles. It's been my experience that the, well products, that succeed well do most things well, and the ones that do one thing exceptionally well may not make it.

The world is changing. The CNC router is becoming a common garage tool. Everyone's doing it. While the needs of the professional should be addressed, yes, but the needs of even the home hobbyist should be addressed too, because one of them is working on this interface, and there will be more where I came from.

Someone questioned my motivations in another thread. Well, elsewhere, I don't like the CNC software landscape. There is bait and entrap. There is draconian licensing. There is software that costs as much as the machine it rode in on. Compared to that, yes it's easy to like LinuxCNC. It's easy for me to want to return something to the community.

~

Anyway, I have to roughing out the setting menu. I had though that in the setting menu, the user would be able to select a plug-in, and either activate it or deactivate it, and then where the menu says Plugin, it would instead say the name of the plug in.

I don't know if that would be possible to program, but I feel that it would be quite powerful if it could. The idea is: as long as only one plug-in runs at a time, the UI would be extensible.

When the user selects the plugin from the menubar, it opens either 1/3 or 2/3 of the screen, like any other menu item, somehow.

Lcvette wrote:

rodw wrote:

Lcvette wrote:

Can it be set up so it's just a flood and mist button which would cancel one about it if pressed? Ie, both in off state,
press flood to turn on, and pressed again it turns off, press again it turns on, press mist, mist turns on while flood is turned off.

That was kinda my thought too. A combined button/LED which is red with text "Mist OFF" when in the off state. When you Press it, it turns green and says "Mist ON". That would save a lot of screen real estate. 3 buttons folded into 1.

I like that they turn green when active, or blue.. a mist button and a flood button I think is plenty, simple and clean and easy to understand. And like to said, safe a ton of screen space.

Sorry, I should have been more clear! That demo shows all three types of buttons a "Toggle" an "On" and an "Off". Only the toggle button is likely to be used, but since the "On" and "Off" functionality has to be there as part of the implementation of the "Toggle" functionality, there is no point in not making those options available as well. These are pretty abstracted in their implementation (and in fact don't even needed a GUI element to function), so can be used for setting almost any boolean state within LCNC (or anywhere else for that matter). I can't think of a application at the moment, but if I don't include the "On" and "Off" functionality, somebody is sure to want it. Now that I have included it, it is almost guaranteed not to be needed. It's kinda like watering the garden, if you water it rains, if you don't water it doesn't.

I thought I explained it well enough in the description, but since the picture is worth 1000 words, and there were only ~500 words of text, I should have know it did not stand a chance! Oh wait, that calculation is based on a incorrect assumption that it was a static picture, but it was a gif! I guess the odds are even worse, but I don't know the formula for gif vs text

Cheers,
Kurt

The world is changing. The CNC router is becoming a common garage tool. Everyone's doing it. While the needs of the professional should be addressed, yes, but the needs of even the home hobbyist should be addressed too, because one of them is working on this interface, and there will be more where I came from.

BrendaEM,

How long have you been using your router now? I certainly understand where your head is at and it is to be expected. However, I think given time you will quickly come to realize a few things. The first is going to be that you hate changing tools in your router. That is a given, you may not care much about it now because its all fresh and new and things are moving around and you are proud of your accomplishments and still have the excitement of the build going on. We have all been there, just some of us that was 5-10-15 years ago or even more. We have evolved through the first iterations of the machine build and found the short comings and headaches you haven't come to loath yet. My guess is within the next few months of real use you will be desperately looking for a solution to your tool changing situation. this isn't to say an ATC, but looking for some way to make it faster and easier than having to get wrenches out. So you will start day dreaming about an iso20, 30 or bt30 router spindle or an add on adapter making the use of those tool holders possible. You may not think so right now but trust me given enough time it becomes a reality.

The fact is, that if you are here you are a maker and the machine you built is proof. It also means you probably will not be happy for long because your brain is wired that way, always looking for some way to improve upon it. know thy self maker. know that by catering to the router only, you alienate not the professional, but the hobbyist that is a year or to ahead of you and is taking their build to the next level and hoping for the interface to come along to make it possible.

Also understand that by widening your scope to embrace the CNC interface as it could/should be to work with many and ALL machine types you will garner more support. You posed this question:

I will offer you another way of looking at it, and you may ask yourself this after reading this post, but if you do not trust my judgment, why are you here? What drew you to this thread?

I can't speak for everyone else, but my answer is simple, hope.. hope that a new GUI was being made to address the short comings existing in linuxcnc that wasn't pathpilot. interest in a design that had merit for getting there that looked great from what i first glanced. a nice layout that made sense. but if the functionality is lacking or the focus narrows towards one machine type, then the interface suffers.

in other words what motivation would I have going forward to want to help knowing this interface would exclude one of my machine types solely because you think routers are better? it turns this from a give back project to a personal project and while I am happy to support and help a giveback help all project move the community forward, spending time devoted to a narrowed vision is not as enticing. I was excited to get up on my weekend day off and push forward on some lathe tools, but now I just don't have the motivation after reading that post. best of luck with your router screen!

Talk about demotivating? There is talk in this thread about countering GUI designs and forcing a particular order for tool for a device I do not even possess.

[This is the second time, it has been suggested that I remove features I will need, the first being shortening the display mantissa.]

What I've done has been inclusive of automatic tool changers, but there is no benefit in excluding people who just run one tool bit all day. What has been counter-proposed, and that is what it is, will not work for people with individual tools.

I should think that professionals would not want LinuxCNC telling them they need to load the tools in the changer in a particular order. There may be optimizations that can be made, such as placing one two or three tools closer together that might speed the creation of a part. It takes time for the changer to cycle or in a machining center, move to grab one from the rack.

In the case of the mill, I have not see an automatic tool changer that uses different tapers in the same machine, so the tools can be measured referencing the base as they would be in loaded signally. There are additional variables, which seem not to be used, so they could for an ATC.

I do find it strange that there is no cutting length variable standard.

Somehow, people made it with Axis, with less tool features than this interface design will offer. This interface design would offer pictures of all the tools for entering the measurements, buttons for reordering the tools, and a use timer--not the world, but a step in the right direction, I thought.

what are you talking about?