Shuttle Jog Controller

[sirbean]

I am on the trail of your software and love the screens so far but have one problem that I am struggling with. I have a Tormach with the Shuttle Jog Controller that they sell. It operates fine with your screens but I have no way of knowing which axis is activated. Is there a way to light up the MPG axis indicators while using the jog controller? I can change incr. with controller just cant see which axis I have activated. If I switch back to the pcnc screen set I get a light by what ever axis I have active, but with machstdmill it doesnt seem to work. Im sure I have a setting wrong or something. Thank you for the help.

[DaveCVI]

Hi,

Nov 15, 2012 21:00:04 GMT -8 sirbean said:

I am on the trail of your software and love the screens so far but have one problem that I am struggling with. I have a Tormach with the Shuttle Jog Controller that they sell. It operates fine with your screens but I have no way of knowing which axis is activated. Is there a way to light up the MPG axis indicators while using the jog controller? I can change incr. with controller just cant see which axis I have activated. If I switch back to the pcnc screen set I get a light by what ever axis I have active, but with machstdmill it doesnt seem to work. I'm sure I have a setting wrong or something. Thank you for the help.

It's probably not a mach setting that is the issue. I'd guess that Tormach added some LEDs to their screen set that the driver for the shuttle turns on/off as the axis selection changes.
The good news is that MSM is fully customizable so the same LEDs could be added to MSM. The trick is to find the LED numbers that the tormach screen set uses... if you could take a screen shot a page of the TOrmach screen set that has the LEDs that would tell me what LEDs you are used to seeing, then I can try to look in the Tormach screen set to find the LED numbers.

Dave

[sirbean]

It is the little dots to the top right of each axis. This is not my screen but axis layout is exactly like that. Thanks for the help! I look forward to trying out the mill turn trail this weekend. Is it hard to edit the screen and is there any risk of causing control issues with my mill? Thanks again

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[DaveCVI]

Thanks, that should let me find the LEDs - give me a day or so as I've got some other stuff in the queue in front of this and I need to dust off a test setup that has the Tormach stuff loaded up to look into this further.

Dave

[DaveCVI]

Hi,

Nov 16, 2012 18:23:00 GMT -8 sirbean said:

Is it hard to edit the screen ...

For just adding a simple LED, it's easy. The MSM screen pages can be edited with MachScreen (that's what was used to make the screen pages).
Don't try to use use screen4 as it is known to create problems in the files it creates.

Nov 16, 2012 18:23:00 GMT -8 sirbean said:

... is there any risk of causing control issues with my mill? Thanks again

Not really. There's no significant chance of that from just adding a couple of LEDs.

FYI - the techniques for customizing MSM are documented in chapter 15 of the user manual.

Dave

[DaveCVI]

Hi,
Here is a customized set of MSM screen that have the Tormach Shuttle LEDs added to them. I looked at the Tormach screen set and found (as expected) that they are using some user space LED numbers for the Shuttle selected Axis indicator LEDs; they use x=1060, y=1061, z=1062 and a=1063

I used the Tormach LED definition and added some yellow LEDs next to each MSM axis Letter. With any luck, these will now turn yellow when the corresponding shuttle axis is selected. I can't test that as I don't have a Tormach shuttle control, so please let me know if it works.

To use these custom set files, please unzip and then copy these two set files into
C:\Mach3\MachStdMill\Set Files\Custom

Then when you start MSM, go to the settings common page and use the load screen button (do NOT use the mach menu viwe/load screen!). The dialog to select MSM screens will come up by default in the MSM master dir; go up one level and back down to the custom dir where you just copied the screens and select the one you want (10x7 or 12x9 resolution).

MSM will reload and you will see the little LEDS next to the Axis letters.

BTW, I just did what the User manual would have instructed you to do to customize an MSM screen, so you can read that section of the user manual if you want to make other changes etc.

Finally the Disclaimer: Feel free to use these with the understanding that these are freebies to help out Tormach users, but are not officially supported for MSM by CVI - i.e. I won't be including these in each MSM release. Thus if something else changes on a page layout in a later release, you may have to tweak these etc. But hey, it's worth at least what you paid for these...

Dave

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[sirbean]

Works perfect. Thanks. Sorry for slow reply. Was crazy busy this weekend. I am impressed with your customer service and look forward to using your product. You have me curious about customized screens. Hope you didnt create a monster. Thank you again.