Greetings all; I am about done with the gui for the display, I've added a long, narrow bar, effectively underlining the text in the label above it, and changing the color of this bar according to the G20-G21 mode in effect.
Next is to change the scale of the jog so the increment/step size, is silently converted to mm's. This means if done directly, the current minimum of .0001" per click jog size becomes 3.93700787401574803e-06 inches, and it will take a bunch of them to get very far. Conversely, at the maximum end of the jog size range, .020mm per click becomes 0.000787401574803149606". And that is still a very small, unusable jog size. Another choice, and I don't like it, would be to leave the jog size presented to motion unchanged, and here I assume motion will do the scaling, so a metric sized move again means a vanishingly small move per click. Let me go see how motion (or whatever is in charge of this) handles this. Now I do have a problem, motion does NOT translate, even though g21 is in effect, the jog size is still in inches. This means that a .0001" jog is 0.00254mm's, a .0010" jog is .02540 mm's. I can of course make pyvcp display the metric measurement, but thats a fuggly, always showing an odd number, solution. I can also scale it down before handing it to motion, but that going to make a long move unhandy, driving the metric user into the equally unhandy mouse work to move a fixed distance. So I think I am stuck with a couple more conversions. The current inch mode motions obtained seem about right. But how do I best present this to the metric user? I cover what seems to be a usable range in the 1,2,5 scale mode with a mux8, but to extend it to useful in the metric domain would need a mux16. All of this is do-able, but I don't want to discourage the metric shop from using it. So the discussion is open: Choices are: 1. Leave the display alone and scale the .0001" minimum down to the metric before giving it to motion, while going to a mux16 in order to gain the max jog size back to motor rate limits since a max jog of .02mm is still pretty slow. .5000 mm is much more realistic for a top speed. I don't like this as its carefull cranking in the jog scale mode for the inch folks where one click could crash and break a tool. 2. Scale the display only to show the metric equ of the jog size selected. But then the metric shop is always looking at odd numbers in the displayed value. 3. However you folks feel is best given that the number display is a fixed 4, maybe 5 digits right of the decimal point. The last thing I want to do is discourage the metric shop from using it. The mics are open, speak up people. :) Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
