ATC Macro - Screen Resolution

[cherokee140d]

Dave

1. CNC Lathe supplier has provided a ATC macro called M6Start.m1s for the lathe.
I copied it to Mach3\Macro\my lathe profile.
It works fine till Mach is re-booted and then an older versions is substituted by MSM.
Verified that after shutdown the older version is in the macro profile.

2. As MSM license may only reside on 2 computers I have decided to use my laptop (vs. home & shop desktops) for all development work. The max screen resolution on the laptop is 1366 x 768. Acer Aspire 4GB 500 GB 15.6" LCD. Win 7 Pro.
In order to see the bottom of the screen and navigation buttons,
I must run with Mach 3 Config set to "auto enlarge screen".
In MSM Mill it is distorted but readable. No room however for the fly out tab.
In MSM Lathe the printing is so small it's very difficult to read. Tried both screen resolutions supplied.

John

[DaveCVI]

Hi John,
please see comments below.

May 22, 2012 6:32:04 GMT -8 cherokee140d said:

Dave

1. CNC Lathe supplier has provided a ATC macro called M6Start.m1s for the lathe.
I copied it to Mach3\Macro\my lathe profile.
It works fine till Mach is re-booted and then an older versions is substituted by MSM.
Verified that after shutdown the older version is in the macro profile.

That's a good thing! - it verifies that MSM is doing what it is supposed to.... ;D
OK, kidding aside, MSM will not let you replace the M6start or M6end scripts, doing so would break the tool change logic MSM implements. So when MSM was designed, we used newer (better) mach interfaces to allow users to extend/customize the tool change actions.

What you are seeing is exactly what should happen if you try to directly replace the MSM M6start or M6end scripts with your own scripts.
The correct approach is described in the manual. MSM turn uses the same mechanisms to integrate tool changers that MSM mill does - so this information is in the mill manual.

There are two choices:
a) if you are using mach's stop and wait tool change mode, then there are events that can call a user script to add functions to the stop&Wait tool change sequence (ProfileM6StartUserScript & ProfileM6EndUserScript).
b) if you are using the mach AutoTC tool change mode, then you want to put your code in code into M6ATC.m1s and MSM will call it for you.

See section 15.9.1 of the mill user manual for both situations. That section will also point you to the template M6ATC files that MSM installs to get you started with this.

The new approach is really much better as it separates the user code from the system code.

For ATC mode it can be as simple as copying the vendor's M6start as M6ATC. However, this is an area where you are doing customization of the core machine operation and you have to understand what the script is doing.... MSM will just call M6ATC and run it... so if the script crashes things, there is no way for MSM to protect against that.

Read up on how this works, and if you want I can take a look at the vendors M6Start script to see if there are any obvious bear traps in it.

May 22, 2012 6:32:04 GMT -8 cherokee140d said:

2. As MSM license may only reside on 2 computers I have decided to use my laptop (vs. home & shop desktops) for all development work. The max screen resolution on the laptop is 1366 x 768. Acer Aspire 4GB 500 GB 15.6" LCD. Win 7 Pro.
In order to see the bottom of the screen and navigation buttons,
I must run with Mach 3 Config set to "auto enlarge screen".
In MSM Mill it is distorted but readable. No room however for the fly out tab.
In MSM Lathe the printing is so small it's very difficult to read. Tried both screen resolutions supplied.

John

I claim that the mach option "auto enlarge" as mis-named, if it were accurately named, it would be called "auto distort". What that option does is attempt to stretch a bit map to fit a full screen, and it does so anisotropically - that's one reason it makes things look so bad (circles stretch to become ovals etc).

For the 10x7 screens, the MSM screen is 768 pixels and so is the physical resolution of the screen, thus MSM fills up the entire height of the screen.

Rather than distorting the MSM images to make them shorter in Y and longer in X (which is what auto-distort is doing), a better approach is to tell windows to auto hide the task bar. This is what I do when playing with MSM on my laptop while traveling.

Dave