Hi, On Montag, 6. April 2020, 15:46:05 CEST andy pugh wrote: > ... I have never had a multi-spindle machine, and so the whole multispindle > patch is a best-guess based on what I thought might be needed
Well, there are completely different designs of multispindle machines. Wookworkers have lots of spindles, used for drilling purpose mostly (drill about 15-20 holes in one move). Multiaxis lathe with multiaxis milling heads work different. One head is a revolver, which can drive multiple tools, but only one at a time. A multiaxis milling head is like a 5axis mill with atc, so each head has a spindle number. The woodworker variant likes to start and stop many spindles at once, on multiaxis lathes this does not make lot of sense. Index, Siemens and Fanuc do something like S1=M3 for multiaxis lathes. I don't know the commands for woodworking machines. The multiaxis lathe have a tooltable instance per head, no matter whether it is a milling head with atc or revolver with turning tools. Tools from revolver may work on main spindle only, work on counterspindle only or on both. Such a machine runs two instances of cnc-controller (like linuxcnc), one for the main spindle and one for the counter spindle. Each instance runs a separate gcode file and both can be synched with each other. Each cnc-instance has its own axis (axis from counter spindle are inverted) and joint for a given axis is selected by tool number. ... We have plenty multiaxis lathe with milling heads at work. ... by the way: in configs/common/server.nml are two channel entries for spindle usage: spindleCmd and spindleSts I had a quick look into emc/task/emcsvr.cc, but there is no corresponding code for these channels. Does another instance own these channels, or is it a relict from good old days? Same may be true for inifile-token "TOOL_CHANNELS". emcsvr.cc looks like one could specify the number of tool channels in ini-file, but that token is not documented, nor does the code ask for the value of TOOL_CHANNELS. Reinhard _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list Emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
