Re: anyone using 4th axis ?

[Jon Elson <jmelson-at-artsci.wustl.edu>]

Ray Henry wrote:

> Jon
>
> The refresh on tkemc is set to 0.2 in the default .ini.  I run it at 0.1 on
> my setup and it seems to work fine.  It is labeled cycle_time under the
> display section.  I got it messed up once because there are two cycle_times
> near each other.

Right, I saw that, but didn't get a chance to try a change there.

> I haven't run a 4th. The RS274NGC paper says that the interpreter and
> motion planner will accept commands for a 4th. as B words -- but it doesn't
> work for me.

I tried A, but I'll try B sometime.  Really, it should be no big deal to
handle A B or C, if you can handle one of these.

>
> Tkemc only computes position display for three axis.  I did the same
> playing with xemc and yemc and tkemc that you've tried there.  I can fix
> tkemc for a fourth display whenever you need it.  The size of position
> display letters just needs to be a little bit smaller, or the screen area a
> little bigger and add the computation and emc_update stuff within tkemc.
>
> We'll have to get Fred to explain what we need to do for the interpreter
> and motion planner.

Yes, definitely.  I was searching for some other things, and saw a LOT
of code that had hardwired in three lines for axis[0] axis[1] and axis[2],
and only a very few places (like user interface stuff) where it had code like
for (axis = 0; axis<max_axis; axis++) .  That was worrisome, as I thought
this was being generalized for more axes.

Jon