GUI for PlasmaC - QtPlasmac

rodw wrote:

Its great to see Linuxcnc FINALLY has a decent softkey board for touch screens.

Two Issues:
1. The lower line of the bottom row of keys is cut off on my screen.

2.The greyed out background is very disconcerting.. the sudden change of contrast is not good on the eyes and I don't believe that technique should be used on a HMI as it would get very tiring all day. What do others think?


Some crazy Ideas, maybe not just for QTPlasmac.
1. numeric keyboard that pops up when a button is pressed

2. calculator entry. What if say you could type {20 * 50} and the formula between the brackets was parsed and pasted into the field? Or {x/2}? There are any number of calulators for Python.

So I tried again in daylight and found the greyed out screen quite OK so it must just have been the ambient light.
Stretching the keyboard fixed the obscured button outlines and it saves the size and position. Very good!

So now onto the crazy ideas section! I see Andy has been giving it a push along too. We don't need the inch to mm conversions here. The archaic units have long since been eliminated from my workshop!

Hi I have been following the PlasmaC GUI evolution and I really want to congratulate phillc54 and all the team for the great work,

I have installed the GUI using a 22 Inch touch screen monitor and have used it (only simulator not real machine yet) it work great.
I have some ideas that I want to share.
1) Z Axis Jog to control voltage during cut, basically use the Z axis jog buttons to override the actual voltage, while arc ok is present. I really don't know if this is too complicated to implement but it will be nice to have.
2) I was thinking in a more process oriented distribution of the controls, for instance, we remove e-stop then activate PowerOn then make a Home All after that we load a file and finally run it maybe we can have a distribution of controls that we can follow these sequence, once again it is a nice to have.
3) the buttons can be a little larger for 20-24 touch monitors.


I will continue using it and share the comments
thanks to all for the great work, finally a decent System (no only GUI) for plasma user

phillc54 Wrote:So you suggest getting rid of the + and - overrides and using the Z+ and Z- buttons instead.
Correct

phillc54 wrote: The latest update allows some estop options by using a variable in the ini file.
Well I was thinkin on grouping the controls by sequence of using I mean the ones used at start up then the ones using during operation
let me think more in this idea.

phill54 wrote: I do intend to do some work on this when it is fully functional and the documentation is complete.
Tom has also been doing a bit of customizing

very nice!!!

Pedro's idea to use the Z jog buttons sounds great!

I like the ability to remove the estop from the screen becasue I finally got this ready to cut today!



I agree with the silly dance we have to do every time we turn the machine on and it really is a pain with Gmocappy which is the closest we have to a touch screen GUI in the past.. I don't understand the OH&S implications of what is required to enable a machine in a compliant way. But I do know my press brake makes it pretty simple. Just turn the power on and switch the hydraulic pump on and its ready to go. (the pump is on the estop loop) I'd actually flagged the problem like Pedro had and wondered if we could automate it on power up. I see Halui has a pin to request a home all and I was going to look at it once I had a HMI operational. A pin to indicate all-homed seems missing though..

The buttons on my HMI are for run/step and pause/resume so I wonder if one of those could not be doubled up. eg.
Hide the estop in the GUI, Press run/step after startup if not homed, turn the machine on and home all.