Gui for standalone thc

In addition to some understanding of hal, you need to learn about the basic
components of LinuxCNC. One major component is called "motion"

You can access the manual page for motion by typing:

man motion

in a terminal window

M3  turns on the spindle so the motion pin:

spindle.0.on

would be a possible pin to connect to the SSR

Great, man motion really helped.
When I mentioned m3 I didn’t realize it was linked to spindle.
I linked spindle.0.on to my ihs/plasma start output and now m3 turns it on and m5 turns it off. Rock on.
I tried get spindle.0.at-speed to work for my arc ok/ok to move. Eventually gave up, but I found a post about m66 for arc ok and it is doing what I need.
I like the idea of a corner hold, but the standalone thc can supposedly handle that, so that’ll move to the back burner.

There’s a lot of non linuxcnc things I need to finish for this table, but where would be best place to focus my research to make the gui appropriate for a plasma. Pyvcp? Can I edit the axis gui? If I could just rename the spindle button and add a few leds, that’d be enough.

Anyways, I really appreciate all the help.



 

Yes, I was suggesting a totally new stepper driven Z axis/lifter assembly.

A few of us did  a lot with plasma before Plasmac burst onto the scene.

Generally, we used a touch off subroutine that was called before the M3. JohnT has a good starting example here (and some other resources)
gnipsel.com/shop/plasma/plasma.xhtml  I think I modified this to probe away until loss of contact before saving the torch height.

Cornerlock just needs to monitor the current velocity and disable the THC if it falls below a threshold (say 90%) of the feedrate. This used to be  a problem becasue Linuxcnc never saved the feedrate,   but a kind developer heard our cries and its now published in motion as motion.feed-upm and a few other variations. Here though your THC will need some kind of input that disables it.
linuxcnc.org/docs/stable/html/man/man9/m...9.html#MOTION%20PINS

I have attached a working cornerlock component