[KCJ]

I think I recognize some of these pics. I'm particularly impressed by the welding on the panel support arm! Great project!

Jason, if I had welded that arm up I would have been too embarrassed to post pictures of it, but your welds were so perfect I just had to show them off!
I guess you think it is about time I stopped piddling on this toy mill and started on your Mazak . . .


I mentioned that I'm working on a new interface for LinuxCNC. It is more work than I expected, but it is coming along quite well considering I have next to no programming experience. So far it is usable on a simple machine such as mine, and I have been using it exclusively for the past 2 weeks or so. It still needs a lot of work before it will be usable on a machine with an ATC or something other than 4 axes of trivial kinematics, though. Currently I am developing it for LinuxCNC 2.7, but will be switching to 2.8 shortly as it has some significant improvements in the way joints/axes are handled. If there is interest I could see about releasing very much of a preview version for 2.7 users before switching to developing for 2.8.

Here are some screen screen shots of what I have so far. I intend for it to be used with only a touchscreen, and so far that seems to be realistic. None of this is set in stone yet, so shout out if you think I should move some controls etc. Also, let me know if you think you might be able to use it, I need some encouragement form time to time when the bugs bite bad!


PathPilot inspired layout with touchscreen friendly backplot controls.
Note the real time chip load and surface speed displays in the spindle section. I paused to machine for the screen shot so there were no values to display. Also note how comments with MSG are picked form the gcode and displayed at the bottom of the screen. (Now that I look at it I guess it should say "MSG: " instead of "INFO: " to be consistent.) Error messages and other info show up there as well.




File selector with support for shortcut folders and gcode preview/editor
Ignore the misspellings for now, but I might need a proofreader later! My sister pointed out that I misspelled "label" as "lable" in all the source code and glade files, don't know if it is worth the significant amount of work to fix.




Popup keypads and numpads for all entries, save as dialogs etc.
MDI has its own special keypad with support for macros, but it's not done yet. I should mention that you can type into the DROs to set work offsets in a similar to in Mach3 or PathPilot. I don't think any of the current LCNC interfaces have this feature, but I think it is a must.




I guess I am hijacking my own thread, I should start a new one for LCNC interface stuff . . .

Hopefully I'll get back to finishing up the mill soon. I have been using it a good bit and loving it, but I still need to install limit switches, neaten up the electrical box, add a spindle relay, finish the control panel, and a lot of other stuff that I can't remember at the moment.

As always, thanks for looking!
Kurt