On Sat, 3 Nov 2007, Stuart Stevenson wrote:

> Gentlemen,
>    I have been exploring a program called Xrefactory. Xrefactory is
> supposed to build a display of the project's data flow. I have been in
> contact with the company that sells Xrefactory. They told me they will
> download the EMC2 project and run their program to see how to make
> Xrefactory work with it. I am sure it will be trivial for them. It is
> not trivial for me.
>    Has anyone used a program like this? If you have, what is it?

doxygen can draw flowcharts by using graphviz. there used to be 
instructions for how to do it but now i can't find them. there is a file 
src/doxconfig if you want to play around with it. generally, i think it is 
a waste of time. the "taglist" plugin for vim is convenient if you use 
vim, and superficially similar to xrefactory. and then there are 
heavyweight IDE's like kdevelop that show code structure in a GUI fashion. 
you can get a better idea of the overall structure of the code by looking 
at http://www.linuxcnc.org/docs/EMC2_Developer_Manual.pdf and 
http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emcinfo.pl?EMC_Components which were 
actually written by a human and thus can impart real understanding as to 
what the code was intended to do. (rather than what it actually does!)


>    I want to contribute to the EMC project but I want it to be in a
> logical fashion. I am not a C/C++/Python/TCL/TK programmer, hence the
> need for a tool to show me the data/variable flow. I am an NC
> programmer and machine tool owner/operator/user. I have ideas for
> "Enhancing" the EMC project. I want to be able to implement my ideas
> in a manner that doesn't conflict or detract from the current state of
> the project.

Most of the kinematics code is in C, and the part you need to write can be 
fairly simple as far as code structure. It is mostly trigonometry. You 
should copy scarakins.c and make it fit your machine, cut out pieces you 
dont need, and document it until you understand everything. Even this 
hard-coded example can be useful for others. Only once you have it working 
and know what needs to be done should you start planning a generalized 
kinematics framework, if you still have the desire to do so. C macros are 
tricky since they are not really part of the language.

While you're at it, I think the addition of tool length compensation to 
kinematics would be very useful; then we could simply specify the position 
and rotation of the tool tip to be in the g-code file. This would require 
adding some code to grab the current tool length from 
emcStatus->task.toolOffset.tran.{xyz} in addition to the regular x y z a b 
c axis variables, and add it to the last coordinate system, which is D5 
and D6 in the SCARA example. I think this may have been what the original 
EMC designers intended, thus the weirdness with tool change position in 
the rs274 spec.

   -fenn

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