Maybe all is not lost?

[Fastest1]

Dave, or somebody who understands protecting your profiles better than I.

After the frustration of manipulating a screen and tinkering with a white screen. I think I am beginning to understand the process.
I reviewed the tutorial Dave made for me on changing the homing script.
I am wondering if I wasnt sharing the same screen for more than 1 MSM profile though for different machines. I believe this is why the scripts changed on both machines.

Please review my interpretation of what is supposed to be done and correct me where I am wrong.

1. Open the profile I intend to use and or modify, in this case I will call it "MSM G540".

2. Go to the "Settings" page and select "Clone Screen" at which point it asks for me to name this new screen, mine will be called "MSM G540 Custom".

A. Are the button and dro scripts in this screen already?
Or do they need to be imported to the new screen? If so, how?
Ass/u/ming (I hate even using that word!) the Master commands are already in the screen I had just cloned, wouldnt I go to the "View" section on the toolbar, select "save current settings" and close?

At this point I would think that if I open the profile "MSM G540" it would automatically open the "custom" set associated with that profile. If I were to edit another button on the screen at this point, would I need to clone the screen again? (I dont think this is the case but I have to ask due to confusion). I think I would only have to edit the button on that page and save current layout.

Then proceed to do this same process for any other profile creating a custom screen for each 1?

Btw I really like the appearance and use of MSM, unfortunately I learn everything the hard way.

[Fastest1]

Does anybody else use MSM? This shouldnt be a difficult set of questions to confirm or deny.

[DaveCVI]

Hi,

I think some confusion is coming from the mixture of some related, but really separate concepts - let me try to explain...

First some terns:
"profile" - the file on disk that Mach uses to store Mach settings. Sometimes called the "xml file" by mach users.

"Screen set name": the name of the screen set that mach loads at start up.

"MSM custom screen set":
A derivative of a MSM master screen set that the user wanted to customize for some reason.

First an observation about the mach profile file: MSM does not store any of it's settings inside the mach profile file. The profile file belongs to Mach, and none of its internal data entries are supported public interfaces to mach. Only mach should touch it and so MSM does not. This also means that MSM can not corrupt a mach profile, as it does not even know it exists.

A mach profile is a file that mach uses to contain mach settings. Much of what a mach profile is for, is to contain the hardware settings for a machine. So a "reasonable" rule of thumb is that a mach profile maps to a machine setup.

Alas, if it were only that simple... Mach also uses it's profile (Xml) file to store settings for things that are not hardware/control related. One of the settings it stores is the name of the screen set to load when mach is started with the profile.

When running MSM, that screen set name is ALWAYS MachStdMill.set
It will never be any other name within the profile - even if you create multiple MSM custom screen sets.

Think of it as being layered....

Mach points to a primary screen set name
(for MSM that is always MachStdMill.set)
this is set the first time you told mach to load MSM via via the menu load screens - and it never changes after that. There is no need ever change it after that.
This is one reason the MSM readme and user manual say to create a separate profile to run MSM. But all profiles that are running the MSM system can run any defined MSM customized screen set....

Within MSM, you can create custom derivatives of the the stock MSM set of pages etc. This is what you do when you use the clone screen button on the setting common page. All this is handled inside MSM - from Mach's viewpoint is is still running the same screen set (MachStdMill.set).

Each customized MSM set uses all the master's bits and pieces - that's how it magically inherits all the functions of the base MSM stuff - only parts (like a button) use user supplied scripts.

So... Yes when you create an MSM customization, you are sharing it across all the profile on the PC which load MSM. That's a good thing - as amoung other things it means that you don't have to go manually copying a bunch of file to various places as part of the customization process (which it would be rather unreasonable to expect a user to be able to do without making a mistake in the process - there are a lot of MSM component files).

So, if you are trying to create a different MSM customization for each profile, there is no need to so so - in fact, I'd hope to convince you that you really don't want to do that.

So this let use this context to answer the question you posed:

Sept 16, 2011 6:02:02 GMT -8 Fastest1 said:

Dave, or somebody who understands protecting your profiles better than I.

After the frustration of manipulating a screen and tinkering with a white screen. I think I am beginning to understand the process.
I reviewed the tutorial Dave made for me on changing the homing script.
I am wondering if I wasnt sharing the same screen for more than 1 MSM profile though for different machines. I believe this is why the scripts changed on both machines.

when you tell MSM to load a customization, MSM remember that and loads it for you as the default "MSM variety" the net time MSM starts. Since there is one MSM install on a machine, this will effect all profiles that use MSM on the machine.

However, you used the phrase "both machines" -if by that you mean two different PCs, the MSM configuration of each PC is independent (MSM config info is stored locally on the PC).

Sept 16, 2011 6:02:02 GMT -8 Fastest1 said:

Please review my interpretation of what is supposed to be done and correct me where I am wrong.

1. Open the profile I intend to use and or modify, in this case I will call it "MSM G540".

more precisely, start mach with MSM - internally this means that the profile mach started to is loading "MachStdMIll.set"

If you are creating a new MSM customization set, it can be nice to be running the stock MSM stuff when you do the "clone" operation. But this is not a requirement - as the clone button asks you want to want to srart from - you can start from any MSM set - be it the stock set or a previously customized one - it then asks you for a name of the new set.

Sept 16, 2011 6:02:02 GMT -8 Fastest1 said:

2. Go to the "Settings" page and select "Clone Screen" at which point it asks for me to name this new screen, mine will be called "MSM G540 Custom".

A. Are the button and dro scripts in this screen already?
Or do they need to be imported to the new screen? If so, how?

No need to worry about how to do this- MSM handles it for you. All you need to handle is whatever custom script code you want to use.

Sept 16, 2011 6:02:02 GMT -8 Fastest1 said:

Ass/u/ming (I hate even using that word!) the Master commands are already in the screen I had just cloned, wouldnt I go to the "View" section on the toolbar, select "save current settings" and close?

Oh my, you can do this - uh, I made the tutorial off the top of my head - thus in hindsight I used short cuts that could get you into trouble.

May I amend the tutorial on the fly here?

When you clone an MSM set file, what you are doing is creating a new .set file. I used the "edit button code" and "save current settings" from mach as a method to edit the clone set file. I should have been more conservative and told you to edit the set file with a screen editor (I use MachScreen for all my MSM work, but screen4 works also as it's a standard mach set file for internal format).

The results of the mach menu approach depend on the set file currently loaded - knowing what set file that is may not be obvious to many. If you use a screen set editor, you explicitly open a particular set file - and then you know exactly what file is being changed. The use of the set file editor is probably less error prone for most folks.

You'd make the same changes with both techniques - just using a tool designed for the task is better.

Sept 16, 2011 6:02:02 GMT -8 Fastest1 said:

Then proceed to do this same process for any other profile creating a custom screen for each 1?

I'm not sure I got what you meant here - it it was important, let's try again after absorbing the info in the rest of this post.

Sept 16, 2011 6:02:02 GMT -8 Fastest1 said:

Btw I really like the appearance and use of MSM, unfortunately I learn everything the hard way.

I like MSM too! ;D I had to use 1024 this morning to make a bug report to Brian - I can't do anything with that screen set anymore...

Dave

[Fastest1]

Dave, Thanks for the detailed explanation. I am sorry for my impatience in posting. What I mean by different machines, is that I run 2 different cnc lathes and 2 cnc mills off of the same computer (dont be impressed, we are talking about Sherlines, Dynas and an A2ZCNC mill). I have different Profiles in Mach with different pin settings, input, output changes etc. I noticed my present issue after modifying the homing routine on 1 mill (why I needed the tutorial you sent). After using that mill, shutting it and Mach down. I reopened Mach 3 but a different profile than the one mentioned above though I do use MSM on both of these. I noticed the same homing routine. 1 Machine has multi axis homing, one doesnt. I am still not understanding how to have my Dyna have 3 axis and my Sherline to have single axis homing. Since then I think I had messed up some screens or settings. I uninstalled MSM and reinstalled trying to recover the original unedited Masters. Not sure I got anywhere though. I am just as confused as ever. I will read this a few more times and see if it helps.

[Fastest1]

Dave, I have opened both profiles in Mach 3 since last post, both screens were white and would not open even after a long wait. I selected "view/load screen/MachStdMill.set" and then slected "save current layout" in both profiles. I now at least have screens and buttons that work. Let me ask this a different way. Can I use the same computer to run 2 mills with MSM? Can each machine have seperate scripts for homing? Btw, I never meant to imply MSM corrupted my Mach profiles. I should have said it like this, during my misunderstanding of how to use Mach and MSM and wildly changing things during moments of perceived brilliance. I managed to corrupt some files that were probably detrimental to the operation of MSM. When I finally do figure out how to open a screen, inevitably all of the ports and pin info is there and correct.

[DaveCVI]

Ah...
The MSM design tends to assume that all copes of MSM on the machine are for one hardware set up. That was not really a design goal, but more of a side effect of the master/custom approach that allows a customized screen set to reuse all the non-customized parts of MSM.

There is a way to accomplish what I think you are trying to do....
There is a Mach interface that allows you to get the name of the active profile at run time - see GetActiveProfileName() in the programmers manual.
Using that, you can test the name of the running profile in the homing routine and do either the single axis or multi axis code as appropriate.

Here is a code fragment to give you the basic idea:
Select case GetActivePRofileNanme()

Case "Name of multi axis homing profile here", "2nd mlti axis profile name here"
' insert multi axis homing code here

Case "name of single axis homing profile here", "2nd singel axis name here"
' insert single axis homing code here

Case else
' put code here that you'd like run for unknown profile names...

end select



and here is an alternative approach you can consider:

' pick a "default homing style"
' then make the first case the names of the non-default homing type profiles
Select case GetActivePRofileNanme()
Case "Name of multi axis homing profile here", "2nd mlti axis profile name here"
' insert multi axis homing code here

Case else
' All non-named profile will use this code, since we used multihoming above
' put the singel axis homeing code here...

end select

Dave

[Fastest1]

So I am not crazy. Thanks for the details. In the end, each machine or the machines I keep will probably have their own dedicated PC, til then this does work well (until I try to modify something). I will review the instructions above and carefully proceed. Hopefully I wont have to bother you too much in these attempts. Again thanks!