Re: Floppy-EMC? and some other questions

["bfp" <bfp-at-earthlink.net>]

> Ray wrote
>
> I see some merit in low res displays.  A lot of what is shown by something
> like tkemc isn't used during any one machine operating sequence.  I don't
> think that any of the existing emc gui's were written for shop floor kinds
> of machine operation.  They were written to give NIST and other motion
> research outfits access to the commonly used features of the EMC software
> API.
>
> I wrote a 640x480 shop-floor gui for emc.  It had very few of the frills
> available today.  Jan tried it out for me and reported that one of his
> machinists was able to intuit a machine control and make parts in a very
> few minutes.  All that's left of that project got directed into
> tkbackplot.  But it proved to me that very specific function, mini, gui's
> can be written and loaded as needed.  These kinds of projects would
> allow the EMC to run a mill using limited computing power and still have
> rather powerful displays.
>
on most of the machines I work on its not so much the size of the screen but
the 'depth' of the interface on some of them you can page thru 4 or 5
screens
in each mode and at least 10 in the paramaters ans settings,evrything about
the
machine can be set thru the CNC shell interface and the OS remains hidden
from the user (probably a good thing)
one of the best mill controls I've used  only has a hurcules mono display

> At the same time, it is also obvious to me that next to a 10-15k dedicated
> cnc control, a $500.00 no-name box -- with enough power to run freqmod,
> tkio, tkemc, tkbackplot,  and IO_Show, while downloading your favorite
> flavor of shop floor graphics -- makes today's control costs rather
> low.
>
thats the big advantage of using off the shelf hardware
the disadvantage is that its noware near as hardened as the
military/industrial grade stuff  -still I've seen more fried boards
from CNC controls than from any kind of PC

> Now my thinking here does not prevent making a palm gui for the EMC.  I
> think that such an animal would be awesome although I'd prefer putting it
> on the palm lookalike that runs linux.  Wireless would be even better.
> Then it should have multiple windows, one for each of the machines in a
> manufacturing cell.  With it you would have access to all of the
> programming and running features of all of the machines  But it ain't a
> pendant.
>
I dont know about the wireless control part but sending status messages to
a text pager seems to be within easy reach,the boss would love that
I can just see him now ;storming out of the office bellowing out
"WHY ISNT THAT MACHINE RUNNING!" and scaring the poor operator
half to death...oh wait -that would be me
on second thought lets hold off on this one for a while ;-)

Brian