Please help, new to PP, Tormach, AND Linux

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Thread: Please help, new to PP, Tormach, AND Linux

  1. #1

    Default Please help, new to PP, Tormach, AND Linux

    Greetings all. Been lurking around here for a while but all the searching I've done hasn't gotten me past a basic started point. I recently purchased an 1100M which is my first entry into oth machining as a whole as well as CNC. In general I have met with a fair amount of success but as I am a tinkerer and can never leave well enough alone I have searched out a great many ideas on how to modify my machine (many of which came from this forum). Most require some amount of changes to the software in my controller but none seem to specify how those changes are to be made. Furthermore, some of the very basic procedures that are discussed here don't seem to work on my machine. Hopefully someone can point me in the direction of a beginner's how-to on getting into the source code so I can make some of the changes others have experimented with.

    If nothing else, I would very much like to have my machine boot to a desktop rather than directly into pathpilot. Left shift-alt have no apparent affect though and ctrl-alt-x to bring up a terminal, while successful, does not get me any further as /usr/bin/gnome-panel results in a does not exist type message. Any help you all could provide to get me to a desktop view, and hopefully from there into the files and folder structure to start playing around would be greatly appreciated.

    For what it may be worth, my machine came with a very small controller rather than the tower that I've seen on the PCNC440 at a local maker space. I'm not sure if that difference in the controller has anything to do with the difficulties I've experienced.

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  2. #2

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    So a small update. It appears my timing was off for hitting alt-shift at boot up. Today I was able to get further with that approach but still I can’t get to a point where I am able to prevent PathPilot from auto loading on boot. When I hold shift-alt I get a screen where I can select to login as Tormach or operator. Using Tormach I get a black screen with activities in the top left. Clicking that gives me an interface that resembles a tablet more than a computer but I am able to get to startup applications from there. However, PathPilot isn’t listed for me to disable it.
    Attempting to login as operator gets me to a more traditional looking desktop but only briefly before I get a screen with a series of error messages. Shortly after that screen displays I get the usual “it is now safe to remove power from the controller” splash screen. I’m sure I’m doing something wrong but I have no clue what.
    I have attached a few images. My apologies if they are sideways, I’m posting this from my phone and I’m not yet familiar with the mobile version of this site

    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails Please help, new to PP, Tormach, AND Linux-7bd3ac81-d9c7-4dca-946b-c074d08b4aea-jpg   Please help, new to PP, Tormach, AND Linux-05a67ccd-af22-451d-bbea-1e1d4f90e802-jpg  


  3. #3
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    Default Re: Please help, new to PP, Tormach, AND Linux

    To disable automatic start-up of PathPilot, I think this will work:

    Start up into PathPilot.
    Press alt-shift-X to get a Terminal window
    In the Terminal window, type this command:
    Code:
    mv ~/.config/autostart/pathpilot.desktop ~/pathpilot.desktop
    Note that I haven't tested not starting PathPilot -- I don't know if you'll just get a blank screen, which would be somewhat autoclimactic.
    To avoid that, you could create another .desktop file that starts a terminal, something like:

    Code:
    cat > ~/.config/autostart/terminal.desktop <<EOF
    [Desktop Entry]
    Type=Application
    Exec=/usr/bin/x-terminal-emulator
    Hidden=false
    X-MATE-Autostart-enabled=true
    Name[en_US]=Terminal
    Name=Terminal
    Comment[en_US]=Start a Terminal
    Comment=Start a Terminal
    EOF
    now, after you re-start, you should not see the Tormach program start.

    To start PathPilot from a terminal, if you're logged in as operator, run:

    Code:
    ~/operator_login




  4. #4

    Default Re: Please help, new to PP, Tormach, AND Linux

    So yesterday was the first time I've been able to get in front of my machine since posting my last update. Got a nice coolant filter in place and plumbed in so powered everything up to check for leaks. In doing so I discovered that pathpilot was no long starting and that the controller was going directly to the operator/tormach login select screen. Again showing my ignorance of Linux, I opted to just do a total restore of the installation. I lost a half dozen tool offsets which are easy to replace and really nothing else so I'm not overly upset about that. Got everything up and running, updated to 2.4.3 and that was all I had time for. I find it interesting, and a little disheartening that I can't seem to even get to the point of making changes without something getting messed up. I'm now in the middle of a new lighting installation project in my garage (where the machine is) so I'm hoping to give it one more go in the next couple days but failing that I may give up on hacking this thing and just use it the way it was built.



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    Member kstrauss's Avatar
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    Default Re: Please help, new to PP, Tormach, AND Linux

    If you are successful in making changes be certain to carefully record what you did. The next PP update will put everything back to the way Tormach thinks it should work.



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    Default Re: Please help, new to PP, Tormach, AND Linux

    a little disheartening that I can't seem to even get to the point of making changes without something getting messed up
    Well, at least you have a system you CAN change. If you buy a HAAS or Mazak or whatever, you will not be able to change it at all.
    Also, the good news with software is that "backing out" and having something working is very easy (just restore, like you did!)
    Imagine being new to car mechanics and having to learn by changing parts of an engine. Much less easy to back out a mistake there :-)



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    Default Re: Please help, new to PP, Tormach, AND Linux

    Perhaps you misunderstood my point. I certainly appreciate the ability to customize things. I just wish that Tormach provided some documented way for me to make changes that are preserved through updates that only change other areas of PP. As a newbie I didn't want for soofl616 to make changes and then lose everything because he updated to a new version of PP but hadn't documented what he had changed.



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    Default Re: Please help, new to PP, Tormach, AND Linux

    Quote Originally Posted by soofle616 View Post
    I may give up on hacking this thing and just use it the way it was built.
    Hacking the control software is something to dig into I guess. Look at Linuxcnc forum for most complete info on the subject.

    Anyway, I find the near infinite uses of these tools out of the box keeps most people occupied just figuring out all you can do with the cad-cam-tools and accessories.
    Good example is Im getting ready to cut custom 2'x4' vinyl stickers on my 24r. Waiting on the transfer alignment paper to finish the project. Couple weeks ago I didn't even know how to do this . The list of what you can pull off with these machines is limited only by money, ability and creativity. I also do stuff on my 1100 w/ 4th axis that challenges all my cad and cam skills to the limits. All on stock machines that I keep software updated, clean adjusted and well tooled to get good drama free results on most anything I can hack.



  9. #9

    Default Re: Please help, new to PP, Tormach, AND Linux

    The saga continues. Thinking perhaps I could start the desktop from the terminal I type mate-session which led to all kinds of happy error messages. The only positive effect was that I did end up with a desktop view. Yay! I was then able to disable auto start of PathPilot. YAY! rebooted, got the initial Tormach splash screen and then... blank gray screen with a mouse cursor. Right clicking gives me a pop up menu with some options including opening a terminal and such but no taskbar, no menu bar, nothing. So much nothing that I ended up doing another factory restore I order to re-enable auto starting PathPilot. I’m posting this while that restore runs. So it seems that I am still hitting a wall with respect to my total lack of knowledge of Linux. Any ideas how I can actually get a desktop view with menus and stuff?



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    Default Re: Please help, new to PP, Tormach, AND Linux

    In the older versions one could change the start menu options.the newer versions I havent figured out how to do it. I quit trying to modify things as every new update overwrites the changes l made.

    I get to the desktop by typing ctrl- alt- x while PP is running.
    Then type caja in the terminal that comes up after the preceding line.
    I havent tried to bring up the start menu in the newer versions of PP.



    Quote Originally Posted by soofle616 View Post
    The saga continues. Thinking perhaps I could start the desktop from the terminal I type mate-session which led to all kinds of happy error messages. The only positive effect was that I did end up with a desktop view. Yay! I was then able to disable auto start of PathPilot. YAY! rebooted, got the initial Tormach splash screen and then... blank gray screen with a mouse cursor. Right clicking gives me a pop up menu with some options including opening a terminal and such but no taskbar, no menu bar, nothing. So much nothing that I ended up doing another factory restore I order to re-enable auto starting PathPilot. I’m posting this while that restore runs. So it seems that I am still hitting a wall with respect to my total lack of knowledge of Linux. Any ideas how I can actually get a desktop view with menus and stuff?


    Last edited by popspipes; 04-02-2020 at 11:43 PM.
    mike sr


  11. #11

    Default Re: Please help, new to PP, Tormach, AND Linux

    Interesting. The caja thing is not something that I have found in any of my googlings to get to a desktop view. I will give that a shot this evening. I am certainly well aware of the need to reapply changes after every update which is a bit annoying but understandable from Tormach's perspective. It's actually quite similar to what Renishaw does with their Equator measuring machines. It's a linux base OS that runs windows in a virtual machine. The control software then runs inside of windows. Every time you boot the machine windows is re-imaged so everything you've set up is erased unless you do very specific things in a very specific way. Annoying as hell but it makes sense as anything you mess up in the configurations or operating system is just a reboot away from never happening which results in a very reliable system.



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    Default Re: Please help, new to PP, Tormach, AND Linux

    Changes you make in .config/autostart/ in the /home/operator directory will persist across restarts and updates.
    The file that starts pathpilot automatically is pathpilot.desktop so you could move that file out to not auto-start. You could create a separate .desktop file that auto-starts Caja (or at least /etc/alternatives/x-terminal-emulator)

    There's also hilariously an autostart file for nvidia-prime, which I'm pretty sure no Pathpilot controller will actually need :-)



  13. #13

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    Quote Originally Posted by jwatte View Post
    Changes you make in .config/autostart/ in the /home/operator directory will persist across restarts and updates.
    The file that starts pathpilot automatically is pathpilot.desktop so you could move that file out to not auto-start. You could create a separate .desktop file that auto-starts Caja (or at least /etc/alternatives/x-terminal-emulator)

    There's also hilariously an autostart file for nvidia-prime, which I'm pretty sure no Pathpilot controller will actually need :-)
    I did try that approach earlier and it worked in that I was able to start up without starting PathPilot but that’s when I first landed on the blank gray screen. Efforts to get from there to a desktop failed so I moved the .desktop file back just to get things back to normal. It was after all that when I tried the mate-session command from a terminal and everything went crazy. If the caja things works out I may edit the auto start to include that but I haven’t tested it yet



  14. #14

    Default Re: Please help, new to PP, Tormach, AND Linux

    Finally some progress!! Again referencing my lack of knowledge of linux, I had anticipated that the caja command in a terminal would bring me to the ellusive desktop view that i have been seeking. In fact it brought up a file explorer window that allowed me to navigate around the file system. Ultimately, this is more of what I was after as I haven't had any real success in navigating the file system through the terminal window. Getting that far allowed me to create a new .rules file from the instructions here: https://github.com/jwatte/teensy_tormach_usbio

    From there I built a quick and dirty test setup with a teensy connected to 4 LED's. Throwing some M64P# commands at the machine got the LED's turned on and the M65P# turned them back off proving that communications between the machine and the teensy were working properly! At the moment I don't have any specific plans for this but a USB IO module has long since been on my list of addons for this machine, I just didn't want to spend the kind of money that Tormach wants for their version. Now that this works my next step is going to be getting more teensy's and seeing if I can truly run 4 io boards simultaneously as I have previously heard is possible. If so, the possibilities become almost endless. 16 controllable outputs can either be used directly, or with a bit of additional hardware and programming I can use those 16 "bits" with some binary logic to get over 65000 potential outputs. Ridiculous I know but this could be used in something like a tool changer to indicate which tool I want or to set a PWM output to a laser module, or even operate a servo for a smart-cool type of attachment. The best part is that now that I am past this initial hurdle, everything else I want to do is nothing more than arduino programming which I am quite proficient at.

    Thank you all for your help on this. Hopefully I will have something cool to share with you in the coming months as I build out some of my ideas.



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    Default Re: Please help, new to PP, Tormach, AND Linux

    Glad you go that working!

    The USBIO isn't a great way of sending "words" like you suggest with the 16 bits of output in practice. While you could build some kind of protocol that ended up "latching" the value each time you wrote the final virtual board, for example, it's slow and not robust in practice.

    Note that there are a number of unused I/O pins on the 5i25 or equivalent card, on the card itself, that you can pull out using a connector and wiring harness. You can then control those pins by configuring the LinuxCNC port pins in whatever way you want yourself. The draw-back is that those configurations need to be re-applied each time you upgrade PathPilot; you'll have to hook this using, for example, a start-up script that checks whether the files are there, and if not, re-applies them, then tells you to re-start the system.

    Another option is to simply write custom M codes. This is probably the simplest, because you can do this in Python by just naming the files correctly. The Python scripts can then open whatever devices / serial ports you want, and send "real" data out, rather than having to emulate it on top of some narrow, slow, bit interface.

    Documentation, as it were: M Codes
    The files are named something like "M123" (for the custom M123 function) and go into ./configs/tormach_mill/nc_subs/M123
    These probably need re-installation when the tmc/PathPilot package updates -- make sure to have good backups :-)
    (Although you'll find the file in the previous version that PathPilot keeps around in the home directory.)

    There's one such code named M100 already shipped by Tormach, and there's also a similar directory for ./configs/tormach_lathe/nc_subs/ for the SlantPro.

    Also, reading the M100 script shows some ... surprising ... ways of communicating between the PathPilot GUI and the script, using some hash key inside a local Redis instance. Amazing.



  16. #16

    Default Re: Please help, new to PP, Tormach, AND Linux

    I assume though, that the the 5125 card is only present in the larger form factor controller. The one that came with my machine is a tiny NUC like computer with no expansion slots and only couple usb outputs along with the hdmi and vga monitor ports. Communications with the machine is done via ethernet.

    The custom M code thing is interesting. Could make it rather more easy to program a 16 bit word output into a machining program rather than having to individually turn on or off each bit. I'm curious as to why you say that method would be slow and not robust. Other than the obvious need to send a whole bunch of m64 commands followed by a whole bunch of m65's which would indeed be slow if I had to input them manually every time. The intent would be to use some sort of subroutine or script to automate it though. Reading the output would be quite simple as it would be nothing more than a quick scan of all the outputs by whatever device I use to do the interpreting.



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    Member kstrauss's Avatar
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    Default Re: Please help, new to PP, Tormach, AND Linux

    Does the NIC in the control computer connect to a Mesa 7i92 or something else?



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    Default Re: Please help, new to PP, Tormach, AND Linux

    In case you don't have a PCI / PCI-Ex card, then they use the 7i92. The 7i92 has a number of extra pinouts that are not used, on the receiving board.
    The HAL files are in configs/tormach_mill/ and configs/tormach_lathe/ with the appropriate names.

    That being said, it's easier to just hook things up over USB and use a USB serial port protocol of some sort, and push in the necessary extensions into PathPilot in Python.
    I can see why using a Teensy is attractive (after all, that's the way I went, too :-D) I just don't think using the specific 4-bit relay I/O protocol is very practical.



  19. #19

    Default Re: Please help, new to PP, Tormach, AND Linux

    Just woke up so I’ll have to take a look int he machine cabinet for a 7i92. Especially now that I have some confidence in my ability to navigate the file system and make changes, if I have a way to tap some extra io from within the enclosure I would much rather do that. Regardless of what might be easier,, direct from the control board is going to look much cleaner. Back in the day I used to build machinery so wiring, conduits, breakout boards on DIN rail, etc is all right up my alley.



  20. #20

    Default Re: Please help, new to PP, Tormach, AND Linux

    Been making chips and dealing with other projects so I just got back to this today. There is no 7i92, just the ECM 1.5 board in the machine enclosure. I assume that Tormach has taken the guts of the 7i92 and built a proprietary board around the same basic design. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any direct correlation between their board and the Mesa in terms of the available I/O headers. There are a number of unused connections on the tormach board including some of the green connectors which appear to be higher power capacity pieces near the top of the board as well as two black pin headers which I assume are I/O related. Unfortunately I have yet to find any documentation to help work out what any of the connectors are for. I have sent a support request to Tormach to see if they are willing to supply any information so we'll see if they respond with any useful information.



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Please help, new to PP, Tormach, AND Linux

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