Kirk, I think MTConnect would be a great addition to LCNC; I started to play with the building of an adapter shortly after MT was released at IMTS some years ago, but quickly got stalled. I have an MTConnect-compatible agent/adapter on my Mazak 410 machine, and it's pretty much a duplicate of the basic info (DROs, program/run status, spindle and axis loads) only. It is NOT intended to be a remote-control platform.
It's not much more useful than that, in a single machine installation, however it's not MT's fault, it's the limitation of the agent. I do occasionally run a terminal server window instead (the Mazak uses Win XP embedded for GUI control on top of the Mitsubishi motion platform) - which for all intents is just as capable as someone who already runs LCNC in a remote xwindow. (BTW, for the top level overview, MTConnect spec defines three levels of soft-ish-ware; the adapter (optional) is the hard worker part that is specific to the machine and does the unification of useful data; the agent, one level up is the "middleware", and effectively the webserver or dbase; and the client is the "top view" that actually displays or parses the useful info. That's the really short and vague version.) I was playing with building an MT adapter/agent for my lathe, (agent would just be httpd to start) that would basically replicate the information that the Mazak would deliver - this is where I started to run into universal problems with development; since LCNC is so modular and adaptable, there would be machines that would have some features and lacking others (spindle load % for example) - so writing a comp to "cover everything" became too daunting. That is the best and the worst of MTConnect, and by design; the adapters (or more often adapter/agent combos now) are specifically deployed unique to your machine (or at least unique to your machine family) and it unifies the info for serving up to the client viewer/app/dbase. Since MTConnect spec information is "free", it's certainly of value to expand one's knowledge. I was hoping to contribute to the LCNC community with this type of development, but the challenge so far has been that it would be like needing to have an additional HAL layer of connectivity just to accommodate all the possibilities of HAL itself. The XML definitions by the adapter would accommodate where the data would go to, what the data was, and how it was formatted, but the spec doesn't allow for additional info, such as "where it comes from" - ie the HAL pin it would be connected to, and at that point I had lost too many brain cells to spend more time writing something that couldn't be extended. It might be feasible to just accommodate "all" the general DataItems in the dictionary, expose a ton of pins to the LCNC integrator, and if not useful or connected, they return null or 0; but when it comes to the tool cutting info, however, it just gets plain messy. In regards to Rockhopper, IIRC, that was more than just a status window, it was intended to be a [complete] doc builder on the LCNC installation (?), but did have a status window, that for simplified intents, would be similar in result. Perhaps that is the better starting point, in that the same variables that are exposed that RH was referencing are the same ones used to build the initial MT adapter. If there are some that wish to form a collaboration on something like this, I'd be happy to contribute, though! Ted. On 8/30/2013 12:30 PM, emc-users-requ...@lists.sourceforge.net wrote: > Is MTConnect something worth learning more about? Has anyone used it > with LinuxCNC? > http://www.amit-deshpande.com/2008/06/mtconnect-live.html > > -- Kirk Wallace http://www.wallacecompany.com/machine_shop/ > http://www.wallacecompany.com/E45/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Learn the latest--Visual Studio 2012, SharePoint 2013, SQL 2012, more! Discover the easy way to master current and previous Microsoft technologies and advance your career. Get an incredible 1,500+ hours of step-by-step tutorial videos with LearnDevNow. Subscribe today and save! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=58040911&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
