A New Widescree-Touch LinuxCNC User Interface Proposal
Hi,
For the last few months, I have been working to design a graphical user interface for LinuxCNC. I am not a programmer, and I have been focusing on the design, and getting input from the LinuxCNC community.
Here is a direct link to the Youtube video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRZ_AMuayoM&t=9s
If this is the type of interface you might like, you might want to comment here:
https://forum.linuxcnc.org/41-guis/3...rendaem#117619
Re: A New Widescree-Touch LinuxCNC User Interface Proposal
Sorry I don't have anything to contribute (I still haven't built my machine I plan on using LinuxCNC for, and I'm not much of a coder) but it looks pretty interesting to me.
Hope you get more interest and some implementation help.
Re: A New Widescree-Touch LinuxCNC User Interface Proposal
Will it come on as I turn on linuxcnc like it does with mach3, if so it is very interesting.
Re: A New Widescree-Touch LinuxCNC User Interface Proposal
I forgot to frame my question properly. Will it come on as I turn on linuxcnc without having done the machine setup first.
Re: A New Widescree-Touch LinuxCNC User Interface Proposal
It's just a concept. It's not actually part of LinuxCNC at all until someone implements it.
Re: A New Widescree-Touch LinuxCNC User Interface Proposal
I got it skrubol, she doesn't reply to anyone though, not here or linuxcnc forum.
Re: A New Widescree-Touch LinuxCNC User Interface Proposal
Hi, I do reply : )
For far, it's just a mock-up, I was trying to get people behind it at LinuxCNC, but I have found quite the contrary.
You may not know that LinuxCNC has off-forum meetings, and things are not looking so good for this interface project--unless others step up and ask for it.
I will be happy to answer any question, either here or in the LinuxCNC thread.
https://forum.linuxcnc.org/41-guis/3...al-by-brendaem
Re: A New Widescree-Touch LinuxCNC User Interface Proposal
Those off-forum meetings are the developers determining how they can improve the base software. LinuxCNC is open source. Which means the developers write and fix code in the base system, and if users wish cosmetic stuff such as the display you show above, it's up to you to either write it or find somebody who's willing to take the time and effort to code that display. Axis and a few others were developed by users who wished for something different than the displays supplied at the time. Same for the folks at Tormach, who took the base LinuxCNC code and developed an interface that worked with their machines.
About the only things the developers should do, is accept bug reports and fix the bugs, work on the new releases which implement new features, improvements in performance, and fixes for problems. If you can talk them into starting from scratch and writing a new interface, that's good, but quite unlikely to happen. They have more important things to deal with than coming up with a new interface when they already have a number of working interfaces.
Re: A New Widescree-Touch LinuxCNC User Interface Proposal
Dozens of users wrote that they welcome another interface design. There seem to be two others interested in it now.
Wendtmk, respectfully, I suspect that there are individuals who strongly want LinuxCNC to go quietly into the night.
Openly, I am not the best at diplomacy, but the documentation hadn't been worked on in so long, that those who might have known how to write were at a loss to update it. That is bad for the LinuxCNC project because that means that not only is the project less attractive to prospective developers, but the torch is harder to pass to the next developer.
The problem with this is: the knowledge base is being passed along by a few individuals who appear to tirelessly and wholeheartedly give of themselves to help others, and if anything should happen to them, LinuxCNC would surely die and be replaced.
The distribution needed updating. Apparently, the maintainers did not know just how accessible and valuable the distro was, so how could they have been appreciated?
As a newcomer, I was greeted with not only hostility from at least one individual, but a lack of objectivity so bad they they were given a ban warning, and on every thread I posted, they harassed me.
LinuxCNC has some housekeeping to do.
Re: A New Widescree-Touch LinuxCNC User Interface Proposal
Who knows what drives the linuxcnc developers but I'm glad they do what they do.
From a user point of view the documentation is much better than in the past. As for the rest of the docs I wouldn't know.
Re: A New Widescree-Touch LinuxCNC User Interface Proposal
Quote:
Originally Posted by
BrendaEM
Dozens of users wrote that they welcome another interface design. There seem to be two others interested in it now.
I'm sure there are folks who might be interested in another interface design. However, the developers already supply a number of working interfaces. A number of those interfaces were written and developed by other folks who are not on the LinuxCNC development team. The idea behind Open Source Software is you can get software for free from folks that write the software. If you want something different added to the base software, it's up to you to either write it yourself, or pay someone else to do it for you. The example of Tormach was given earlier. They took the base LinuxCNC and made changes that they wanted for their interface.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
BrendaEM
Wendtmk, respectfully, I suspect that there are individuals who strongly want LinuxCNC to go quietly into the night.
Sure, but I would bet they are primarily in competition for users of LinuxCNC. I've been using LinuxCNC since back in the days when it was EMC2. It fit the requirements for the machine I designed, and with a little help both on the mailing list and the IRC channel, I got it up and running and it's been doing so for over 15 years. Not going to knock any other software controller, since the folks that use those like the way they work. The difference is, most all of them are commercial offerings. LinuxCNC is not. It's open source. I've made changes here and there that work for my machine. But that's not the obligation of the developers. They work on the base code, upgrading it, making it better, faster, stronger, etc. If the user is looking for something different cosmetically, that's on the user.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
BrendaEM
Openly, I am not the best at diplomacy, but the documentation hadn't been worked on in so long, that those who might have known how to write were at a loss to update it. That is bad for the LinuxCNC project because that means that not only is the project less attractive to prospective developers, but the torch is harder to pass to the next developer.
The documentation gets worked on at almost every version change. It has to, to keep up with the changes in the base software. Are there errors in the docs, or are the docs not as well written as they should be? Sure. But those get fixed over time too. A lot of folks that do not write code have volunteered to work with the documentation and help fix errors. It's not perfect and probably never will be, but its a work in progress.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
BrendaEM
The problem with this is: the knowledge base is being passed along by a few individuals who appear to tirelessly and wholeheartedly give of themselves to help others, and if anything should happen to them, LinuxCNC would surely die and be replaced.
There are always new folks volunteering to help develop the software. The software is quite complicated, so it takes a dedicated team and it requires folks that are well versed in different areas.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
BrendaEM
The distribution needed updating. Apparently, the maintainers did not know just how accessible and valuable the distro was, so how could they have been appreciated?
The distribution gets updated quite frequently. New versions come out on a regular time line, with bug fixes released in between. Not sure what you mean by the above statement.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
BrendaEM
As a newcomer, I was greeted with not only hostility from at least one individual, but a lack of objectivity so bad they they were given a ban warning, and on every thread I posted, they harassed me.
There's jerks everywhere. I've been a moderator here for a number of years, as well as forum admin or moderator on a number of different forums. I see them all the time. I don't know what your original and follow up posts were, since I don't read the LinuxCNC forum, but based on your posts here, I think your expectations of the developers to write software for something you want that isn't part of the base code may be a little unrealistic. I've used open source software for years as a system and network administrator, and have written code for OS projects. If it's a bug that affects the software, or an upgrade that makes the software better, OS developers are usually all over that for active projects. For cosmetic changes, that's a lot lower priority, and maybe, if time and people are available, it might get worked on. On large software distributions with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, such as LinuxCNC, you probably won't get much of a response from the development team.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
BrendaEM
LinuxCNC has some housekeeping to do.
If you wish to have something not included in the software, it's something you'd need to do yourself, or have someone else do it for you. That may mean you'd need to pay for that work. Otherwise, perhaps you should look at commercially available software, and pitch the idea to the company's developers. Writing software is a large investment in time, to 1) initially write the software, 2) bug check to get it to compile, 3) bug check it to it ensures that it works with the base software, 4) rewrite it for new versions and upgrades, and work out the bug fixes in the mean while. You mentioned earlier that you aren't a coder. Take a software language programming course and see what all is involved with producing quality software. It takes a lot of work and ingenuity to produce software that does what it's supposed to do, with good error handling, and with as few bugs as possible at the release date.
Mark
Re: A New Widescree-Touch LinuxCNC User Interface Proposal
Wendtmk, respectfully, some of LinuxCNC's web documentation isn't even on webpages. I am not sure of the documentation history, but it appears as if it were meant to be a book at one time, judging by the chapters and verse's that we do not usually see on modern web pages. The documentation is a work at risk of losing its process.
Granted my diplomacy is poor, but so is/was the state of the documentation, when I posted about it. I think also that the Wiki has some good information in it that should be integrated into the main trunk. The forum is becoming become the defacto LinucCNC reference.
I know that the creation of a new interface is not a trivial matter, and suggesting a new interface was not something I tread on lightly. Against the wishes of a few members, I worked for months to make sure that the proposal I have presented had as few gotchas and wrong turns as I could.
I also feel bad for the creator(s) Gmoccapy. What a great too often shunned work.
I was surprised to see any opposition to the inclusion of NativeCAM in the LinuxCNC. It's great, and it was written for LinuxCNC.
It's bewildering why a probe screen--written especially for LinuxCNC isn't even on the distribution disk, but LibreOffice is?
LinucCNC is vitally important to home-machinists and even the hacker community; I've heard from people who use it professionally in their job-shops as well.
My situation and effort aside, I feel that conflicting corporate influence is preventing LinucCNC from growing.