Adjust soft limits from the UI?

Is there an easy way to adjust the soft limits from the user interface?
I have a small bench-top mill and sometimes the vice overhangs the back of the table. With limited Y axis travel I'd like to change the Y- soft limits to match whether or not the vice is installed on the table.
The way I do it now is to have two different setups of LinuxCNC... one for with the vice and one without, and launch the appropriate one on startup.
Thanks.

Geosec wrote:

The way I do it now is to have two different setups of LinuxCNC... one for with the vice and one without, and launch the appropriate one on startup.

That is exactly what i wanted to suggest.

You can access the limit values through hal like this example:
net limit-x-max-set <= your_x_max_limit_value => ini.x.max_limit
net limit-x-min-set <= your_x_min_limit_value => ini.x.min_limit

so you could switch between two fixed values set in the ini file or i suppose you could also use a pyvcp slider to set it.

Yea, I don't know how the program works re: soft limits. Wondered if maybe they are loaded at start up and changing would require a restart.
Was hoping a custom button could be added to the UI where, the Y- could be moved to the limit I want and a "SET Y- LIMIT" button could be clicked. Then a... Set Y- To Default to restore it to normal limit.

What UI are you using?

Currently GMOCCAPY. Though I may change to something else in the future. Since I'm just getting started I'm pretty flexible to change.

I was just thinking...
Being able to adjust the Z- soft limit too may be useful. I'm probably too paranoid about crashing into my vice/table by accident though.

Gmoccapy offers custom panel integration using Glade. Installing the Glade editor can be a bit of an adventure, at least the last time I did it some years ago.
So you could have a toggle button in the gui to toggle between two sets of limit values defined in the ini or you could also add some spinboxes to enter the limit values in the gmoccapy gui itself.
If you just want to change the limits outside of gcode execution then I think that is all that is needed if you want to switch them while gcode is executing you need to add a queue buster to get the motion planner to work with the updated limits. Some experimenting may be required.
As for how easy it is to implement, that would depend on your skills and/or motivation of course.

Thanks, I'll look into that when I have more time.