a few QtDragon tweaks IMHO

I have some ideas for improvements for QtDragon. These are mostly personal preferences so take with a grain of salt...

1. I really like the dark screen on QtDragon but doesn't seem to exist on QtDragon_hd.
2. The gradient background on the toolpath window is a no go (no go anywhere else IMHO), we want as much contrast as possible and black solid background is the way to fly. Monitors in shop light glare add there own unwanted gradient.
3. I think when you hit a limit, the axis should de-reference (DRO turn red).
4. I think the big pic of the tool and spindle adds no value, I wish we had some configurable user hal pin displays here.


All I can think of for now...

1) qtdragon's stylesheets should work ok on qtdragon_hd
2) if that's a common complaint I could change it to solid as default
3) interesting - do you hit limits a lot?
4) some people like fancy pics and it does give an idea what the page is for.
ideally the spindle pic would change depending on tool type but I don't have enough tool pics yet. A user was working on it then disappeared...

I notice people rave over pyqtvcp's ATC graphics but I don't understand the need - cool yes - really useful I don't see it.

user HAL pin displays - what do you mean?

Thank You Chris,

1. I am not sure they work 100%, I had to tweak mine to work but it has been weeks and forgot the details.

2. It is my strong humble (maybe not so humble) opinion.

3. A lot less now that I tuned up the machine and run Linuxcnc, but when I do, I darn sure can't believe the soft limits any more. It helps me to know exactly why the machine tuned off and is a constant reminder to re-home even though I might choose to keep running de-reffed on the current sheet (for various complicated reasons). I am hustling when I run this router and at midnight I don't always catch (or remember) the subtleties of events. I also admit this is what Mach3 did and I am used to it.

4. Hal pins. Well I know some people calculate their loop latency through hal pins, it might be cool to display this. I am calculating homing error each time I home to see 1, how repeatable my home switches are and 2, if I lost any steps in the last run. I throw this up on the status msg currently. I am sure people could think of all kinds of things to display. Kinda like how the home,limit,probe LEDs work but I want to display float values instead of just some booleans. Overall I think people will find modding the handler file simple, but adding features to the UI is more difficult, so a few extra generic displays would be cool.

Kent

1) ya i've changed them a bit along the way - i'll add one in qtdragon_hd folder so it's easier to find. I did recently change the style dialog to make it hopefully easier to find the relevant folders.

2) ok I certainly can understand wanting the best contrast in production. I probably could make it configurable from the style sheet - but yes it's just eye candy fluff - practicality should take precedence.

3) soft limits moving is a definite problem - sounds like lost steps hey

4) sounds like you want an unbed HALmeter kind of screen - that's interesting.
I have a test panel for HAL (qtvcp test_panel) which is a little more then you want and I need to build a signal selection function yet..