Announcing Deckard: StreamDeck support for LinuxCNC

blazini36 wrote:

Rod, how do you always manage to derail the point and make it about something that you have that has absolutely nothing to do with the topic?
 

He showed up in another one of my threads to pee in my cheerios as well, incorrectly suggesting that I didn't implement my home switches correctly on my latest conversion project, rudely suggesting I should go study the documentation.  When I pointed out why he was wrong, not to mention that I've been using LinuxCNC for 15 years now... suddenly no more replies. 

I realize he's been helpful to a lot of folks, particularly with Ethercat stuff, but this kind of behavior isn't particularly useful to the community.

It's a clever idea that tangentaudio came up with here. I'm not a fan of the streamdeck but the concept is good. It really wouldn't be a huge feat to replicate such a thing with an off the shelf 7" LCD and a microcontroller to handle button inputs and spit it out to a SmartSerial port which is "realitme"......other than software which isn't my thing but if anyone wants to grind away at the keyboard I'm sure I could make a device and post the plans.

I hear you, the StreamDeck itself isn't ideal for the environment, but the concept has merit for CNC machine control.  I'd enjoy collaborating on a project, but my main problem is lack of time these days.  My background is in software, firmware and hardware development, as well as GUI and HMI design, so it's right in my wheelhouse.
 

Take it easy there, guys. No point getting personal because somebody got off topic.

Aciera wrote:

Take it easy there, guys. No point getting personal because somebody got off topic.

Agreed, I didn't mean for it to be a personal attack on Rod.  Just relating how a couple of instances of his forum behavior came across to me.  The off-topic part doesn't bug me that much, tangents are how good discussions happen.  But, "you made X and I don't like X, I'd rather use Y" is not a particularly fruitful discussion about X.  Just move on and use Y, if that's how you feel.

I'm sure these discussions would be much smoother over a round of beers.  Just the nature of forums sometimes, unfortunately.
 

I have added experimental support for standard keyboard key injection into the X Window System (via the Pynput Library )  This opens the door to something like making an MDI keypad page which would be shown only when in MDI mode.  I need to do some more work to add page swapping/navigation before it will be fully practical, but generating the keystrokes from StreamDeck keypresses works.

 

 

I was shopping around on Aliexpress and found these 7" parallel LCDs:
7" LCD

These are good for being driven from an MCU, there's a pretty decent library on github with a bunch of this type of LCD. There's an SD card slot on it where I suppose images could be stored. Using an HDMI LCD would be a waste for something like this.

They also have similar LCDs with a built in ESP32 but there's no real GPIO, so it'd need some I2C IO expanders to actually read buttons. When I get around to it I'll whip up a PCB with an STM32 and an RS422 transceiver for the interface and something for the buttons, I'll probably have to experiment with that a bit. Either way I can see a DIYer being able to make something like this for well under $100

BTW tangentAudio, hope I'm not threadjacking too hard......I can take this somewhere else lol

blazini36 post=300713 userid=23364
BTW tangentAudio, hope I'm not threadjacking too hard......I can take this somewhere else lol

I'm happy to throw some ideas around for a DIY version, but let's start a different thread for that.  If only we had a subforum for user interface hardware... image missing /media/kunena/emoticons/blink.png