New GUI for touchscreen/no keyboard.

[samco]

(and mouseless) One of the emc2 developers got a Mori Seiki JR with a dead control and converted it to emc. He wanted to make a clean keyboardless interface. This is in the development version of emc2. You can see the before here..

http://geektrap.com/bill/01248711886

after

http://timeguy.com/cradek-files/emc/jr.jpg

It isn't 100% yet - in the next post I will have the design notes. It does require some hard controls..
( http://git.linuxcnc.org/gitweb?p=emc...2c895a;hb=HEAD )

Pretty cool!!

sam

[samco]

http://git.linuxcnc.org/gitweb?p=emc....notes;hb=HEAD

The design of "touchy"[1] is as follows:

No keyboard is required.

No mouse is required. It is meant to be used with a touch screen.

Configurability of font sizes makes it work with any screen
resolution.

Some hard controls are required. The absolute minimum set of
controls is:

* A momentary abort button, connected to the hal pin touchy.abort

* A momentary cycle start button, connected to touchy.cycle-start

* A wheel/mpg, connected to touchy.wheel-counts

* A single block toggle switch, connected to touchy.single-block

* Of course, a real estop button hardwired in the estop chain
as usual (not strictly related to touchy)

Additionally, there are some optional controls:

* If continuous jog is wanted: Three center-off bidirectional
momentary toggles (or worse, six buttons), hooked to
touchy.jog.continuous.x.negative, ....x.positive,
... y ...,
... z ...

* If a quill up button is wanted (to jog Z to the top of travel at
top speed), a momentary button connected to touchy.quill-up

There is currently one optional indicator output:

* touchy.jog.active can be connected to a panel lamp to show when
the panel jogging controls are live

Touchy has several output pins that are meant to be connected to
the motion controller to control wheel jogging. They are:

touchy.jog.wheel.increment => axis.N.jog-scale (for all relevant N)
touchy.jog.wheel.x => axis.0.jog-enable
... y ... => ... 1 ...,
... z ...

Also be sure to connect the wheel/mpg to axis.N.jog-counts as well as
to touchy.wheel-counts. If you use ilowpass to smooth wheel jogging,
be sure to smooth only axis.N.jog-counts and not touchy.wheel-counts.

Touchy requires you to write a file named "touchy.hal" to make
these connections. Touchy executes the hal commands in this file
after it has made its pins available for connection.


These things are not done, and should be done:

* Configurable axes for 5 axis machines, etc.

* Lathe support which shows radius/diameter instead of X

* i18n


These things are not done, and may or may not ever be done:

* direct viewing and editing of tool table.

I currently use a network connection for this, just like I use
network to edit/replace the gcode programs. G10 L1/L10 is good
enough for the normal tasks.

* Calculation and display of the extents of the loaded program

This requires interpreting the entire program, and is a bit hard
to get right because of tool lengths and other considerations
like probing.


These things will never be done, don't ask:

* Add onscreen controls for jogging and cycle start, etc, so
touchy can be used without real controls on a real panel

The reason for this is the unreliability of touch screens and
the safety that comes from having actual buttons/switches/wheel
to do dangerous and critical operations such as executing gcode
or jogging. Even with MDI you must use the real button, after
confirming the command displayed onscreen is what you want.
This is a feature.

(It is possible that homing and spindle fwd/rev should also
require a press of the cycle start button for safety's sake.
They currently do not.)

I have seen two controls that attempt to allow you to jog using
a mouse or touchscreen. On one you drag your finger/pointer in
a circle. On the other, you drag it from side to side. These
work very badly and touchy will not have a scheme like this.

* adding a full onscreen keyboard for any reason

These suck.


[1] Like "git", "touchy" is named after its author.

[Quazar]

Thanks for posting this! I'm in the process of setting up a small mill conversion with a touchscreen and this is exactly what I was looking for.

Cheers,
- Dean

[lumberjack_jeff]

This is completely awesome. Thanks for posting.

I would very much like to refurbish a dead 3 axis knee mill with EMC since I use it on my gantry router and love it, but would really prefer to use the stock touchscreen location.

[WoR]

thats for posting this, i too am going to try this out once i get everything running good.

[jbcj]

I loaded the Touchy interface. I like the way it works. One addition would be visual feedback on the handwheel buttons Change color on selection so you can see where you are at. Just the kind interface I needed.

Jim

[j.guenther]

I am a little new to EMC2 but not to CNC. I would like to get the Touchy interface working but I am unsure about how and where to install it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

John Guenther
'Ye Olde Pen Maker'
Sterling, Virignia

[UWP_Wes]

This is interesting.

How does it work with no keyboard if there are only "G","M",and "S" letters available? You could not even do a tool change like this.

Just off the top of my head you need D,F,H,Q,I,J,K,X,Y,Z.....

[samco]

I didn't get a screen shot of that.. but as you start typing say G2.. Then it fills out the manual screen with x y i j lets say (depending on the plane selected) It is very intuitive.

this is a quote from someone that runs large machining centers on emc2.

Gentlemen,
Yes, Cradek has dabbled with touchy. I am using touchy on the G&L. I have
run Cradek's Mori Seiki Jr with touchy. My assessment is touchy is ready for
prime time. It seems complete. Touchy needs people to use it and give their
evaluations and suggestions.
I will change all my machines to touchy. Touchy is well thought out. Kudos
to Cradek for 'dabbling' with it.
thanks
Stuart

sam

[j.guenther]

Hello, I am trying to get touchy to work on my system. I started trying to get it to work on 2.3.5 with no joy. It was suggested to me on the emc users list over on source forge that I should upgrade to the 2.4 Pre release which I have done and I still can't get it to come up. I really like what I have seen so far and would really like to try it out.

Any assistance will be greatly appreciated.

[Quazar]

Hello, I am trying to get touchy to work on my system. I started trying to get it to work on 2.3.5 with no joy. It was suggested to me on the emc users list over on source forge that I should upgrade to the 2.4 Pre release which I have done and I still can't get it to come up. I really like what I have seen so far and would really like to try it out.

Any assistance will be greatly appreciated.

Have you had any luck bringing Touchy up?

I will be trying over the weekend, but I thought I'd bump this thread incase anybody can provide guidance getting it going easily.

[EDIT]

I went looking on the EMC2 forum and found a link to this page.
It looks like EMC2 2.4 may be released in just a few weeks,
so I think I'll wait instead of trying to cobble it together myself.

[/EDIT]

Cheers,
- Dean

[j.guenther]

Yes. I got Touchy up and running. I upgraded to 2.4.0~pre and after correcting some errors caused by my attempts at getting it running with 2.3.5 it came up just fine. I looks real nice, seems to work well on my 800x600 display. I am currently working on a very basic pendant for the required 'hard' controls. As soos as that is done I will try using it in the shop.