Re: running emc in mm units

[Ray Henry <rehenry-at-up.net>]

Babar

I'm happy to hear that you are out of jail on "work release." <g>

I don't have much experience with mm but I would think that you could 
leave the machine's definition in inches but start it up with mm as the 
default unit for work by editing/adding a line in the ini for mm.

; General section 
-------------------------------------------------------------
[EMC]
...
; Startup codes for RS-274-NGC interpreter
RS274NGC_STARTUP_CODE =	G21

That should then tell it to read things like the var and tool file in mm 
rather than inches and use mm when reset.

Now select mm as the default display by setting the ini lines as follows

; Units for display, default would be AUTO
; LINEAR_UNITS = AUTO
; LINEAR_UNITS = INCH
LINEAR_UNITS = MM
; LINEAR_UNITS = CM
ANGULAR_UNITS = AUTO
; ANGULAR_UNITS = DEG
; ANGULAR_UNITS = RAD
; ANGULAR_UNITS = GRAD

Now whenever you write a program, it would be very wise to include a G21 
near the top of the program to remind the interpreter that this is mm 
stuff.

You could also change the default display size in tkbackplot if you dig 
into that code a bit in plat/nonrealtime/bin/tkbackplot.  About line 65 
is the following.  

# This variable sets the default size of the plot and can be thought of 
as number of
# pixels per inch of machine motion.  The default (40) will give about 
.55 screen
# inch per inch moved.

set size 40

You could change 40 to 1, 2, or 3 depending upon the size of the parts 
that you are making.  This edit works immediately and requires no compile 
or make or anything like that.

Hope this helps.

Ray




On Wednesday 18 December 2002 10:49 am, you wrote:
> Hi forum
>
> Its been over a week after i got released from the
> Jail (Counter Stucking problem)  :-)
> I have tuned all the three axis so far and my milling
> machine
> is running in manual, auto and mdi modes in inches
> units.
> I want to run it now in mm units since in my country
> most people work
> in mm than in inches.
>
> The variable "LINEAR_UNITS" is found in [TRAJ] section
> the other
> three "UNITS"  variables are found in [AXIS_X]
> sections.
>
> I had set the LINEAR_UNITS found in TRAJ section to
> 1.0 so that
> i can run my machine in milimeters. But it doesnot
> works.
> Instead it disturbs the scaling of my machine.
>
> Can EMC work both in MM and inches just by selecting
> the units
> from the menu bar? or do we need separate ini files
> for
> running emc in inches and milimeters?
>
> I am very happy since my axis are tuned after spending
> lot of
> my time playing with P,I,D and Velocity Feed Forward
> gain.
> Will I have to retune all these variables if i
> configure emc
> to work in mm??
>
> Please write some words about running the EMC in
> milimeters
> and inches.
>
> Thanks and best regards.
> Babar
>
>
>
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