On 7/15/2013 10:28 AM, John Kasunich wrote: > > On Mon, Jul 15, 2013, at 03:31 AM, Michael Haberler wrote: >> Am 15.07.2013 um 05:57 schrieb Chris Morley <[email protected]>: >> >>> What if we got rid of 'modes' and relied on interpreter signals to decide >>> if controls work or not. >>> eg. if the interpreter is 'idle' manual controls would be usable on the GUI >>> and/or >>> MDI commands will execute. >> That is possible, but I would suggest a different approach to mode switching >> - not at >> the interpreter level, but a motion primitive: >> >> I view MAN vs AUTO/MDI being in effect separate input channels to motion. You >> can feed either channel with manual motion commands, or interpreter generated >> - there's no conceptual difference. > For the most part this discussion is over my head, but I do want to put my > two cents in here. > > There definitely _is_ a difference between MAN and AUTO/MDI, beyone simply > the source > of the motion commands. The list of supported commands is also different. > > Not only over my head but given my lack of experience with commercial CNC machines I kept thinking I just didn't know what every CNC operator knew.
John, I think you and I are on the same wavelength. Looking at resources like my copies of the earliest EMC User Handbook I could find (20 Jul 2003), Machinery's Handbook 26ed, and Peter Smid's CNC Programming Handbook, 3rd ed., it would appear that 1) MDI has been with us since the earliest times when CNC machines were fed by paper tape, G-Code was a set of primitives, and MDI was the way for an operator to enter "one program instruction at a time" to quote Smid, and 2) manual mode was the mode the machine was in when it was not in MDI or Auto and in which the operator could flip switches, turn handwheels, etc., e.g., do things that were outside program control. So what? That was then and this is now. Let's not waste any more time looking backwards. It's sufficient to understand how the existing LinuxCNC works and be able to describe it to users. Looking forward, let's do a sufficient set of Gedanken experiments to be sure we understand what we really want in the next generation LinuxCNC and make it so. Regards, Kent ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ See everything from the browser to the database with AppDynamics Get end-to-end visibility with application monitoring from AppDynamics Isolate bottlenecks and diagnose root cause in seconds. Start your free trial of AppDynamics Pro today! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=48808831&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
