Pavel and myself would like to announce a major overhaul auf GladeVCP, which has been vastly extended and made more useful.
GladeVCP was added to EMC2 master by Chris Morley in late August this year. As introduced, it builds on PyVCP ideas to provide 'virtual control panels' with LEDs, buttons, sliders, spinboxes etc and interfaces to the HAL layer to display and set values. While PyVCP uses the TkInter widget set and a XML-based UI description, GladeVCP uses the extensive Gtk widget set and several HAl-specific widgets, and the glade WYSIWYG user interface editor to more easily create a visually pleasing user interface . Gtk widgets, as you might know, form the visual basis for the Gnome desktop environment as used in Ubuntu. If all you want to do is create a panel of HAL widgets and interface to/from HAL, then both PyVCP and the original GladeVCP cover that functionality. If you want to create UI components with more functionality that just HAL I/O, the updated GladeVCP provides a convenient base for doing so. It does so by associating arbitrary Python code with events. Events might be user-driven like 'button press', 'spinbox value changed', 'check button clicked' and so forth, but also change notifications of monitored HAL pins - meaning you can have code executed when a the value of a given pin changes. Moreover, there is support for 'persistence' - which means a GladeVCP application can save its state, and restore it on the next invocation. This means that - in particular value entry fields, but also toggle buttons and other objects, reappear with the value they had when EMC was exited last. This feature is optional, and without persistence, objects are restored to predefined default values. For storage, the popular '.ini' format is used. Some HAL widgets go further than what was available in PyVCP. Try for instance 'emc touchy.ini' in configs/gladevcp to see the Gremlin tool path preview widget in action, as well as Pavel's graph widget (the latter being still in 'technology preview'). For some inspiration on what you can do with the overhauled GladeVCP, see the configs/gladevcp/probe application. It interfaces to EMC through MDI commands, supplies parameters to, and calls an O-word G-code subroutine which does probing (a feature which only recently was fixed to work with O-word subs). There is now a directory configs/gladevcp with a collection of application examples. Documentation as of now consists of the following Wiki pages: - http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emcinfo.pl?GladeVcpSetup page for an introduction and setup - http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emcinfo.pl?GladeVCPprogramming to introduce concepts, principles of operation, and programming howto - http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emcinfo.pl?HalWidgets for a reference of available HAL widgets The original GladeVcp page is still in place but outdated by now, and refers to the new Wiki pages. We are determined to come up with proper LyX-based documentation for GladeVCP to integrate with the rest of the EMC manual as this matures, and fix bugs as they come up - please use the bugtracker for this. For now, the Wiki pages will track features (and bugs) of the current code. Michaell & Pavel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Lotusphere 2011 Register now for Lotusphere 2011 and learn how to connect the dots, take your collaborative environment to the next level, and enter the era of Social Business. http://p.sf.net/sfu/lotusphere-d2d _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
