Re: [Emc-developers] [Emc-users] Activating edited tool table

[Anders W. <and...@he...>]

Hi developers,

> If you have ever setup and run a machine in a production setting using all 
> the work offsets you would know that having to use MDI and G10 to do 
> something as simple as bump a work offset a few 0.0001,s is not 
> reasonable.  

<snip>

> Similar pages could be made for viewing and changing values for other 
> parameters/variables.
> A page showing the current values of the local variables would also be 
> handy.  This page would need some way of backing up thru the values for 
> each higher level sub program.
> Note that these pages need to be live, so that the machine operator can see 
> the values changing as the G code program is running.

One thing I thought about for pyVCP was this type of functionality.
Displaying and controlling HAL pins is all good, but since everything in 
EMC can't be controlled with HAL, I think a complete VCP implementation 
needs hooks to enable poking around the places where HAL can't reach.

For viewing stuff I've considered parsing the output of emctop.py to 
find out the current machine state and show that in a VCP indicator. Not 
a very nice way to do it...

So, if I understand correctly the way UIs control everything in EMC is 
through NML commands. How hard would it be to have pyVCP widgets receive 
and send NML commands ? Is this a good idea ?

My vision for this is that you could have lots of different tabs using 
the notebook widget where you can see and modify offsets, tooltable, PID 
settings, etc. while the machine is running. I don't like the idea of 
hard-coding stuff, so I like the approach with an XML file that defines 
the panel lay-out and functionality.

regards,

Anders