Re: To Do List was EMC Cookbook

["Arne Chr.Jorgensen" <instel-at-online.no>]

Ray Henry wrote:

> Arne
>
> I haven't had any time to play with the Tk canvas widget but it seems to me
> that we could at least make a set of 2 dimensional back plotters for blocks
> of RS274NGC code using canvas widget commands.
>

< sorry - I snip a little bit >

Well, here is why I started to look at this tclvogle.  Vogl/vogle is a "very
ordinary graphic library".  It is small, and free.
I do have reasons to believe that this may have been part of SUN's Java stuff.
Many of the java examples looks to be the same you found in the older Vogle.  It
is fast to turn around 3d wire mesh objects, and stuff.  If the tcl build, was
updated to newer release of tcl,  then you would have something nice.

Matt and Fred found this TDCAD program written in tcl.  It will read in DXF files
and output them.  You can import direct from Acad, and get it up on the display.
The only trouble is that because of the tcl canvas origin at the top, - you have
a lot of difficulties with translations of let say arcs. You could write some tcl
stuff to take care of this, but this and other routines would take time.  With
the tclVogel all this would be solved a lot easier, and you would also have 3d.

Your idea about a visual "machine" is in fact what I was playing with. If any
recall it,  I posted some questions on how the axis would move etc.  because I
don't know the machine parts. I still have to learn more about tcl, - but then I
started to look for some way of "fixing" the canvas, - and ended up with this
vogle thing.



>
> I'm still hung up on your idea from quite a while ago -- a micro mill using
> floppy drive steppers and slides.

<snip>

As I understand it, several have done it.  I got a note from Chris Paine, and
they run floppy drives. They just had to use
a couple of pull-up resistors.  I just thought it was a cheap way to start, and
it should be simple.

//ARNE