The history of the code is quite helpful and explains a lot. Just to be
clear, I'm not complaining! Because of all of the fine work on emc I now
have a fully functional machine and it took very little effort to get
there. I was the CTO at a very large corporation for many years so I
have a nasty habit of trying to make any software (and hardware) I touch
better if possible. 

A command line argument to emcrsh would be very helpful and so would
finding the port shutdown/initialization bug.  The directory issue is
easy to work around by using symbolic links. The port issue may prove
much harder.

The other issues are relatively minor and now that I understand them
they don't interfere at all. They may eventually affect other people
though and should be kept in mind.

I'm very thankful for all of your help and I really think this is one of
the coolest examples of open source out there.
- Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: Eric H. Johnson [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Thursday, March 12, 2009 11:16 AM
To: 'Enhanced Machine Controller (EMC)'
Subject: Re: [Emc-users] How can I get emc to automatically run
g-codewithout an operator?

Michael,

A quick preface before addressing your individual points. Emcrsh
basically
just ported the functionality of emcsh to a telnet type interface. IOW,
the
tk/tcl interface was replaced by a socket interface. So in most cases
the
reason it does what it does and separates the commands out the way that
it
does is because that was the way it was done in emcsh. 

>> I finally got it working! Thanks Eric. 
Emcrsh is really quite neat. <<

Great, that interface had two primary objectives.
1> Make the simplest possible network interface
2> Use a standard protocol independent of the particular version of EMC
running.

>>A couple of observations though - 1. I checked the source code for
emcrsh
and it hard codes the relative path "../../nc_files".  I think this
doesn't
make sense since it precludes absolute paths and creates confusion by
implementing relative paths and hardcoded directories. I would either
leave
the path off or allow it to be a parameter to emcrsh. Also the path is
different from the path specified in the .hal file. <<

I don't remember if I added that, or if that was how it was done in
emcsh at
the time I ported the code. I can add a command line parameter to allow
specifying the path to use for the g-code files.

>> 2. When a file is finally opened the telnet session gets an ACK but
the
Axis screen doesn't refresh. The filename on the title bar changes but
the
code and the image in the path window doesn't update. This certainly
doesn't
give you the warm fuzzy feeling that the right thing is going to happen
when
you hit run! <<

As Les already pointed out, they are separate entities and can at times
compete with each other. Another thing you will find is that operator
and
error messages will get snagged by the first one in and missed by the
other
application. Usually Axis will get it first because it typically has a
faster update rate.

That was among the reasons I suggested using TkEMC to get it going.
TkEMC
and emcrsh use fundamentally the same interface, and in fact share some
common code (shcom.cc), so they get along much better.

>> 3. Perhaps it is because my print out of the help text split
task_plan_init onto two pages but I wouldn't have guessed that I needed
to
set task_plan_init before opening a file. I think this may have been the
reason that my previous attempts at moving nc_files around and trying to
open my test didn't work. Since I'm not sure how you can open a file
without
calling task_plan_init maybe open should call it automatically. <<

I had completely forgotten about that until I dumped a log file to see
the
exact commands I send when doing an "open". The reason it is not called
automatically is because that is the way it was done in emcsh. Which
does
not mean that we can't change it.

>> 4. Occasionally when emc initializes it doesn't allow connections
through
port 5007.  I'm not sure how to reproduce this but it happens about 1 in
5
times. <<

I have seen that too, but have not been ablt to isolate the cause.
Whether
it is in the shutdown code of emcrsh or something about how EMC shuts
down
in general.

Regards,
Eric



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