Hey, all.

I live in South Africa, and am posting this because its something that the official suppliers said couldn't be done. (I of course new this was utter bs when I looked at their system in the first place)

Ok so the problem I had was a client wanted to bypass CAD4 as he had to make a drawing for each size component - anyone who's ever used a machine before and does allot of custom stuff knows this even if it takes 1 minute to do is a headache and in an environment with improperly trained staff a disaster waiting to happen.

In order to bypass this within Ilenia they wanted it to have the option of setting the dimensions of the board they were cutting - without editing the programme itself. After a bit of tweaking this is the solution I came up with, might be a bit raw as the suppliers of the machine - the Italians at least from their contact address within the help file don't respond to e-mails queries communications ect and deem it only worthwhile providing the more complicated control commands and working in Italian and French instead of English.


Edit
C:\iLENIA\Cn\AutGen\Dist.ini in the following ways

Line:7 -> Fields Numbers change to a new value depending on the amount of fields you want to display - Note only a maximum of 9 will ever display from top to bottom so you will have to prioritize.

Under [Fields Definitions] I used Field16 and Field17 add The parameter you want prompted making sure if you want it visible to have a 1 at the end of the line.

Fields Definition is setup in the following way example Below
FIELD16=DX,2,3,0,0,0,0,1,1
Field No = [Name],Field Display Position, Type of Holder (1=Whole Number, 2=Long Whole Number,3= Decimal Number),Unsure,Decimal Points,Minimum Value, Maximum Value (If greater than 0),Something Special,Editable within Code,Visible as a parameter

Once this is set when you reset you Ilenia these values will become visible on the right hand side. However the first mistake I made was to try to run LPX and LPY which were already there (You can't do this as they are overwitten in ParmLoad, so you need to make new value holders)

Then when building a programme you call the variable using the [Name] you gave it in the ini file in this case
N10 G0 X=DX (or Effectively LPX if you are using it to do what I am doing)

Be Sure to include within your programme an error check just in case some stupid machine user fails to actually set the values - I prefer setting LX and LY in the header to the defualt thus if the machine operator doesn't set it it will just do the normal stuff - and if he does the custom stuff

Heres the code for that.

; SETUP Dummy DX and DY
N150 LDX=DX
N160 LDY=DY

N170 JM(LDX>0):ENDX
N180 LDX=LPX
:ENDX
N190 JM(LDY>0):ENDY
N200 LDY=LPY
:ENDY

I use LDX within the programme instead of DX as this will allow for greater consistance within the usual environment.

If anyone is having issues with COMAC similar to this let me know, as to the most part I found their documentation incomplete, irritating (Learn Italian Today), and their international service responses, non-existant.

And finally the machine consultants within South Africa really do try! but I think they face the same responses as I got from their international service mail - Nothing even though their website promises within a 24 hour response in English or Italian (And I just asked for a PDF of their manual in English Please) - Heck if they had said sorry we can't help you cause you are not paying us I would have understood immediately, but no response is kinda slack