Originally Posted by
Fenichel
It's good to hear from a kindred spirit.
My latest thought is that the whole notion of Conversational gCode programming is misguided. Changing the parameters inside the DROs on one of the conversational pages in PP is not easier than changing the assignments to well-named and well-annotated parameters in gCode.
Instead of having Conversational options in PathPilot, Tormach should curate (providing some, accepting others from users) a library of gCode utilities covering the same (and new) functions. In each such utility, the computation now done in PP before generating gCode would all be done in the gCode itself. My round-pocket utility shows examples of this, as the parameters of the plunge and the spiral are computed on the fly, in response to the user-specified assignments at the beginning.
Here is a thought experiment, only slightly farfetched: Create gCode to cut a line of 6 circular pockets, with centers at (0,0), (1,0), (2,0), ..., (8,0), with the nth pocket 0.1*n deep and n/8 in diameter. That would be a PITA to generate with PP Conversational programming, and the resulting gCode would run to over 20000 lines. I could tweak my existing program to do that with about a dozen new lines of code.
I will be working on creating more specimen utilities for such a collection, but I'll need some help. As noted in my thread-milling exercise, the code generated by Path Pilot makes use of some knowledge I don't have; I've had to throw in a number of arbitrary-looking constants. I'll try to make a list of the places where arbitrary constants are utilized in creating the PP code, and members of this board may be able to fill some of the gaps.
For that matter, I might be able to get some help from Tormach itself. As noted above, I believe that the whole Conversational approach was Tormach's error, but in general, as shown by their videos, they are serious about teaching; they are not willing to sell iron and forget the customer.