Hi,

On Dienstag, 7. April 2020, 16:13:07 CEST Rene Hopf via Emc-developers wrote:
> 1. Fix pocket numbers

I'm no developer, but please allow me to bubble a few thoughts about 
tooltable, atc, pockets, slots, ...

I'm quite unlucky to work on a machine, where I have to struggle with atc-
slots. But I'm convinced absolutely, that's because of the deficits of the 
tooltable (my machine has nothing that can be called tooltable seriously :(  - 
tool properties are just entries in onedimensional parameter list)
My colleague at work that work on a recent mazak don't have that problem, as 
mazak machines have a marvelous tooltable. With big comment field, where you 
can enter meaningful descriptions and a picture, that shows the tool ...
cnc-UI shows the tool picture of the current active tool - so cute ;)

My colleagues don't bother with slots. Everything works by toolnumber, even 
the backdoor of the atc (with about 150 slots), where you can load or unload 
tools from atc, works with tool numbers and tool-description.
Yes, you can search commentfield for substrings :)

So I believe, that an atc should be like a blackbox for linuxcnc (on many 
machines the atc comes from a different vendor, than the machine) and tit for 
that - the atc should not be allowed to touch tooltable from linuxcnc.
The atc-interface is pretty clear and simple: machine and/or operator ask for 
toolnumber and the atc should manage its own/private reference-table, where 
the toolnumber is associated to a slot.
The atc does not need to know more about a tool, than its number.
But for internal purpose, it will probably need more properties about the 
slots than just a number. But linuxcnc should not care about internal 
properties of the atc.
There are many flavours of atc, but if the atc is an exchangeable module, only 
the toolnumber interface is of interest.

So the tooltable in linuxcnc should be extended/changed. Slot field should be 
removed. Current file format already supports a comment field, axis and some 
other guis (like mine) read the file that way, but backend of linuxcnc does not 
support comment in status, which is pretty poor.

I believe, that its a big overshoot to put the tooltable in the nml-status-
area. Tooltable-properties are quite seldom requested by ui, so it would be 
sufficient, if the table or parts of it would be served at request only.

Such a tooltable as described would improve decoupling of modules and would be 
good deed for users too :)


cheers Reinhard




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