Hi there, I've set up a spray coating robot using motion stuff I bought off ebay and EMC as the controller. We've been using it happily for a couple months now, but it would definitely be better if we had dedicated panel buttons for START and CANCEL rather than having to use the mouse to click the little start arrow in the AXIS interface.
My hardware interface is through the parallel port and it has plenty of extra pins I could use for these two buttons. I used stepconf to set up the interface, which was very convenient. As a consequence though I'm not too knowledgeable about how to go beyond this easy type of setup. I've read through the documentation, but I guess I'm hoping someone could point me to the easiest way to implement this. It seems to me that the easiest thing to do for the start button would be to: - use stepconf to assign the button to digital input 0 - add an infinite loop in the G code, with a line at the top of the loop that says M66 P0 L1 to wait for the button to get pressed The cancel input seems more tricky. I could also assign this to a digital in, but it seems clumsy to have to put an IF test on every line of my G code to look for the cancel button to go high. Ideally when the cancel button is pressed, the 'spindle' (sprayer in my case) would stop, and the carriage would move back to the load position to wait for the next start command. Alternately, it might be easier to just shut off the spindle and stop the motion if the button is pressed. Then the user would have to jog it back to the load position and maybe restart the program. The cancel button getting pressed should be a very rare occurance, so it would be ok if recovering from it were somewhat annoying. Maybe the ESTOP function in stepconf parallel port setup would be the right thing to use. I can't find a description of what happens when it gets this input, but I could try it and find out I suppose. I feel sure lots of people have done similar things. Any advice about the best way to do this? Thanks for the help. EMC rocks! -Holly Gates ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Come build with us! The BlackBerry(R) Developer Conference in SF, CA is the only developer event you need to attend this year. Jumpstart your developing skills, take BlackBerry mobile applications to market and stay ahead of the curve. Join us from November 9 - 12, 2009. Register now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/devconference _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
