Kent, A heartbeat would be a nice feature although about the only circumstance I can think of where loss of communication would be a problem is if it occurred in the middle of a jog. Even there, the soft limit or end of travel limit should stop the axis eventually, and worst case there should always be a hard wired e-stop in close proximity to the operator station.
So far I have found lcnc to be rock solid in the sense that it will run continuously for months and never crash, unlike my Android tablet for example. However I am concerned about all the bloatware that keeps creeping into the various flavors of Linux, hence the reason I would still like to see a headless form of lcnc able to run on a minimal server install of Linux. I want lcnc to do one thing, reliably control the machine, because errors leading to reworking or scrapping parts can be expensive. Thus, where possible, I prefer to offload any other functions not directly related to controlling the machine. Regards, Eric As folks around these parts know, I often advocate for headless systems, but were I setting up a real machine shop, I'd want to include some kind of continuous two-way heartbeart so the machine controller can---or at least has the capability to---go to a safe mode if the user-side "disappears" for whatever reason, and the user interface can warn if communications with the controller is lost. By the way, Sergey Kaydalov did some interesting work on a web-based interface in his miniemc system using javascript, jquery, a minimal web server, a hacked-up emcrsh, etc. I started porting just his interface to LinuxCNC and got as far as understanding in detail how it worked, but then got distracted with family health problems. The port would take some work because of the many alterations he made to the core of emc2 to get it working on his limited-resources ARM board, but I still think it is doable. I was looking to make a GUI comparable in functionality to Touchy but more portable. Necessary? No. Interesting? Yes. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Monitor your physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure from a single web console. Get in-depth insight into apps, servers, databases, vmware, SAP, cloud infrastructure, etc. Download 30-day Free Trial. Pricing starts from $795 for 25 servers or applications! http://p.sf.net/sfu/zoho_dev2dev_nov _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
