Help! am Stuck!

[ImanCarrot]

Hope someone can help me on this one, I've tried everything and generaly don't ask for help unless I'm genuinely stuck.. here goes:

My Diamond turning lathe accepts it's own twisted version of movement commands, but there's a big chunk of it that's basic X, Z movements.

I want to cut all these out and paste it with my own set of X, Z co- ordinates. Easy enough I thought, but apparently not.

My machine will only accept X, Z co- ordinates in the form:

X 05.66919Z-00.90208
X 05.65979Z-00.89865
X 05.65040Z-00.89522
etc etc

ie: It has to be that exact format including leading zeros and trailing- say Z-0.5 would be Z-00.50000.

I wrote a program in BASIC to output the X and Z values I want to Paste into the beast but I cannot figure how to get leading or trailing zeros if the numbers aren't in that exact format. For example, my generator will output stuff like:

X 5.5 Z 0.123
X 5.409 Z 0.1229

etc... the format is not the same, is there anyway to convert my output to the required output.

Manualy editing is not an option... there are typicaly 1700 lines of code on a small 17mm dia component and I typicaly go up to 100mm dia. I've also tried fooling about on Excel with the data, but to no avail.

Any ideas gratefully received.

Many thanks in advance.

Iain.

[ImanCarrot]

*bump*

Oh, if it makes a difference, my BASIC program can output the X, Z values without the actual letters "X" and "Z".

[neilw20]

Hi Iain.

In basic, add 100 or some big number to the values, then turn them into a string.
Seeing as how the numbers always are in the the range of say 1000-1099 on the left of the decimal point, just clip off the left digits.
You will have to handle the '-' sign separately.

you need 7 digits.
First decide if the number is positive or negative.
Make sign$=' ' if positive, and '-' if negative.
For positive number:
eg. if required number is 04.32100, adding 1000 you get 1004.321.
or for negative number:
eg. if required number is -04.32100, subtract 100 you get -104.321.

Now we always have something 4 characters wide on left of the dot.
Make axis$='X' or 'Z'
multiply that by 100000 again, and you get
100432100 or -10432100 and convert it to a string with result$=string$(number)
Now take the left 4 characters units$=left$(result$,4)
result$=axis$+sign$+right$(units$,2)+"."+right$(result$,5)
gives X 04.32100 or X-04.32100 which should make you dumb system happy.
You can use the same scheme in excel if you try.
That's the general idea anyway.

Regards. Neil

[ImanCarrot]

Man, that is a sweet workaround, many thanks Neil, it was doing my head in!

[neilw20]

Originally Posted by ImanCarrot Man, that is a sweet workaround, many thanks Neil, it was doing my head in!

You are welcome. It may not be perfect. Haven't done that for 20 years!
You can do it fancier with instr$ function, but why kill readability with a one liner. No brainer now we have bulk computing power.
Translate that to excel and you will learn and achieve something.
Do it in LISP and you are a genious!

Best Regards.

[dcoupar]

Just out of curiosity, have you tried the Format function?

MyStr = Format(334.9, "###0.00") ' Returns "334.90".

[ImanCarrot]

Argh, I just found out about that off of a collegue- I ended up using:

OPEN "O",#1,FL$ (FL$ being the filename)
PRINT#1, "X";:PRINT#1 USING "##.#####",X$;
PRINT#1, "Z";:PRINT#1 USING "##.#####",Z$
CLOSE #1

That still doesn't put the leading zero's in and sticks a space between the "X" (and "Z") and the actual value, but I used find and replace to work round it.

It actualy works! now I have full control of the beast Muahaha! the power! *cackles evily*