[shassel]

Is there a way in PathPilot to set up Administrators with advanced privileges as opposed to Users with limited privileges? Something a kin to personal computer where Administrators can install software and make system changes, but mere Users cannot?

This is why I'm asking. We are in a Makerspace and deal with a continual stream of novices, myself being the chief novice. Users make mistakes that sometimes affect others. The most common is to set the X WORK Offset on the Lathe when they mean to set the X TOOL Offset. I'd like to lock that field so it can only be changed say by entering a password or something.

[jwatte]

This is not a feature built-into PathPilot, no.
However, PathPilot GUI is Python code.
If you're OK with updating the Python scripts, you could probably make this happen.
You'd also have to turn off automatic updates, and be sure to re-apply your changes after you manually update.

[rodw]

Its Linuxcnc under the hood It keeps all of those parameters in a file which by default ends in .var but they probably changed the file name. The file will be listed in the ini file.

One solution might simply to keep a copy of that file set the way you like it and copy it over to the correct location between users and restart LInuxcnc. That way everybody would start from a known position.

[shassel]

Thanks, rodw. Interesting, but not sure where to find these files. I'd rather have it automatically restore the preset X-offset, but I don't want to overwrite changes made to the tool table.

[jwatte]

Do something like this:

1) Set the value to "7.125"
2) in a terminal, do something like "grep -r "7.125" to find where this value is stored
3) write a small script that resets that particular field of that particular file to the value you want
4) arrange for this script to run on startup

There's a couple of ways to do 3 and 4, depending on your specifics desires.

[rodw]

You'd actually be better off asking on the Linuxcnc forum. There is a lot of activity working with pathpilot there.
There is probably a simpler way
When you find that ini file, look for this section (will have different values)

[RS274NGC]
RS274NGC_STARTUP_CODE   = o<metric_startup> call
SUBROUTINE_PATH         = ./
PARAMETER_FILE          = metric_parameters.txt

The parameter file name I mentioned is the last entry. but there is also the ability to specify gcode commands on startup either on this line or by calling an external gcode file as this example shows.
So just set up your default parameters via Gcode and on any startup, all values would be reset to known defaults.

I'm not familiar with the pathpilot GUI but there is likely an XML file that determines the screen variables and you could hide or disable certain screen fields and add a password field to the screen that asks for a pin number.