Back to Axis - and finally installing Andy Pugh's macros

Full circle?

Given the current state of flux of the various lathe GUIs (Probe Basic, gmoccapy, Qtvcp etc), I'm going to revert to something reasonably stable for the time being. I'm now gravitating towards the AxisGUI which has a lathe version and is the default GUI most people see when they try out the LinuxCNC SIM.

How to install a functional version of Axis lathe:

From what I recall, the process is pretty simple - once you've figured it out. That's pretty much the score with LinuxCNC anyway, so not a great surprise. You start at the "configuration selector" and choose the "sim.axis" group, then select the "lathe" option. This creates an Axis configuration for a lathe. This can be run as a standalone simulation but obviously that's not a whole lot of use here.

Configuration:

The next step is to replace the SIM components with real world equivalents. So for starters, we need the INI and HAL files from before, as they connect the virtual machine to the real world. The INI file needs to have the same name as you'd like to appear in the config selector - and the title bar of the GUI itself. So I went for axis_lathe. I copied my previous INI file across from gmoccapy and renamed it appropriately.

In the subdirectory hallib, I copied over the Bantam_v1.hal and xhc-whb04b-6.hal which seems to have done the trick.

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Tool table:

Slight problemette here. I can see there's no sensible way to run programs without a means of editing the tool library. For this, a file named tool.tbl would need to be present in the axis_lathe folder if it were a milling machine - or lathe.tbl if indeed it's a lathe.

Sounds simple enough but when I selected File > Edit tool table... I couldn't get anything to happen. It's supposed to launch a tool editor in Gladevcp. Turns out the file lathe.tbl was corrupted. It wasn't enormously difficult to figure out that the file was corrupted.

The columns shown can be customised: the default is to list every possible axis and all manner of offset, regardless of the application. Here's a little guide to how the tool table works and how to edit it.

Andy Pugh's macros:

One of the drivers for the choice of Axis was to be able to use Andy's macros so that I have the option to use conversational operations. I've see this being described on the forum. So now, let's see if this works out.

Oooof. That doesn't look so nice. It appears that the recent changes to Python have screwed this up too. Bollocks.

Finally (after not much messing about in the end), I have it working. However:

• For threading, the spindle speed seems to be limited to 20rpm (min) and 200rpm (max). Chamfering is limited to 250rpm (max, with no min). I can see the benefit of limiting the spindle speed in some situations but is it simple to change those limits? I can't see them but perhaps I don't know where to look.
• The scroll buttons in the dimension boxes don't work for me - is there a fix for that? I can select the digits with the mouse or by tabbing through the boxes then use the popup box to clear and edit the values. If I double click (or accidentally reclick) the dimension, the popup gets hidden behind the main window which was confusing to start with and best avoided.
• The tool / speed boxes at the top right seem to be incorrectly scaled. Is there a simple fix for this? It may be related to the above scroll button issue perhaps.

 

Apart from the fact I can't see what to do next, that's close to a result, as I seem to have got Andy's macros installed to some degree. Actually getting them to generate some machining moves is just a detail of course....