Flexible GUI

109jb wrote:

I got my touchscreen monitor delivered yesterday and just wanted to confirm that the issue I was having with touchscreen button not working right was a consequence of using Flex GUI in a virtual machine on windows. The Flex GUI that I made works perfectly on a real machine with touchscreen. For the real machine I am using a RPi 4b and a generic 10" touchscreen monitor.

For anyone else designing their GUI this way, I am using VirtualBox on a Windows 10 machine. The virtual Machine has LinuxCNC 2.9.4 installed from the live iso download. Here are the couple quirks I have found running it in the virtual machine. I want to stress that these issues don't exist once the .ui file is put on my RPi machine.

1. touchscreen buttons don't respond as expected in virtual machine
2. The machine will unexpectedly go to "Power Off" as soon as a motion command (Jog, MDI, or in a program) completes. Doesn't do it every time, but pretty often. Again, only in the virtual machine.
   
   I also want to again give thanks for this wonderful tool and to give a peek at what I am working on. I have a 3 axis benchtop mill (RF-45 size) that I converted to CNC a few years ago. I did this as a hobby and use the machine for my hobbies. It has been run with many things including LinuxCNC on an old tower PC with ancient monitor, keyboard and mouse, with GRBL on an Arduino hooked to a Netbook with my own Visual Basic interface, and I tried one of those standalone controllers, but sent it back because it was junk. I finally decided to just do it better and got a RPi 4b, installed LinuxCNC and have been working on an interface that for most of the way I use the mill can be done without ever touching a keyboard. I'll still have a small wireless keyboard with trackpad available if needed though. This is the interface I'm working on and I think it will suit me. I have the UI sized to perfectly fit the display that I bought to use as much space as possible. Thanks again for the very useful tool.
   
   John B

I've been doing mine in a Virtualbox Debian VM but the host is Manjaro Linux.  It sounds like you are just catching realtime or feedback errors. I pulled some of the sim stuff from prebuilt configurations so I could run mine without being attached to hardware, I don't have any errors that put it into E-stop condition. The touchscreen works exactly as it would running Debian itself so I think that issue is more about the host you're running the VM on.

I am having an issue installing Flex GUI on a second RPi 4B that I have. Here is what I did and what is happening.

1. Downloaded and burned fresh image of LinuxCNC for RPi onto the micro SD card. Version 2.9.4.  Boots up fine,logging in with cnc/cnc as user/password.
2. Downloaded the Flex GUI download from the github repository. Version flexgui_1.1.2_arm64.deb
3. Right click the downloaded file and selected "Open With 'GDebi package Installer'"
4. In the GDebi installer, wait for it to load and click the "Install" button.

From here, the GDebi package installer window disappears and nothing happens. Flex GUI apparently isn't installed because the CNC menu doesn't have the Flex examples.

Can someone help with what I am doing wrong?

Been reading about Flexible this morning -- this looks like a good project!

Couple of questions, though.

I assume that if one found a UI that was close, it would be easy to modify, right? There's no reason for everyone to start from scratch?

Is there a gallery of sample UI screenshots? For that matter, is there a repository of completed interfaces from users?  (I realize this is a relatively new project, so I may be overestimating the user base.    I've been using Axis for 20 years, but other than adding my own pyvcp panel for probing and a few other things, my needs are very simple.  Probably similar to the UI shown by @109jb four (or so) posts back.

The .ini and .hal files for my DIY mill (3 axis, very simple) were (re)generated by pncconf. To try Flex, I guess I'd create a new mill directory, copy my conf files, and edit the DISPLAY section to point to Flex? Just trying to get a handle on the "getting started" part.

Finally:  how stable is the project?  @JT -- are you running it yourself, all the time?  (I think that's necessary but not sufficient as a gauge of stability --  sers always find bugs that developers don't, of course.)

Yes, if you found a ui file that you like you can just copy that to your new configuration directory and change the DISPLAY and add the GUI setting.

gnipsel.com/linuxcnc/flexgui/ini.html

There are quite a few running Flex GUI on their machines including myself. It is quite stable now.

I have a lot of videos on getting up and running with Flex GUI
First tutorial videos
www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzYeNVt90...AsRGVDCtpW9_7ZXiSTak

More videos
www.youtube.com/@Gnipsel/videos

Now that Flex GUI is on version 1.2.0 I plan on making new videos to show off the features and how to add and use them.

JT

I may watch a few videos, but I'm a little old skool when it comes to TV time on the computer. Once I find my way around the docs, I think I'll be fine. Thanks for the INI file pointer.

paul

if you found a ui file that you like

Ah -- but that other question:   where would I find complete UIs?