On Saturday 29 November 2014 03:29:31 Marcus Bowman did opine And Gene did reply: > Good Morning All, > > I have a Contour Shuttle Pro v2 and I use it with XP and Mach3 on one > of my machines. Works jolly well too. Extremely good as a flat-lying > pendant., and has, as far as I'm concerned, a very intuitive feel. But > I run LinuxCNC mostly (swappable drives and other machines and > computers) and I miss the Shuttle. > > Does anyone have any info about how (or if) I can get the Shuttle to > work with LinuxCNC? I'm running v2.5 on this particular machine, under > Ubuntu 10.4 (sticking with what's working, on a critical machine) but > I can easily upgrade, and I have one other computer running Ubuntu and > 2.6, and one I have just built and am about to commission, which will > be running the latest version under Wheezy. If I can get the Shuttle > working under the most current setup, I can upgrade the others > shortly. > > I have seen some comments on other bulletin boards suggesting no > drivers are available; and Contour themselves don't seem to do a Linux > driver, but I wonder if there are any sources of drivers or if there > is a way to get it working? Contour's comments on one BB suggest there > is a problem because its a USB device, but I can't see why that should > be an insurmountable problem. > > Grateful for any help. > > Regards, > > Marcus > There would be some lag, but probably not enough to notice when running the machine by hand from the shuttle as I think it can be in the 10 millisecond range, much faster than our reflexes. I think I'd plug it in, and run usbmon to see what it outputs, and write a shell script to do any translations needed to make it look like a parport pendent or whatever pendents we do have drivers for.
That might not be fast enough, but could serve as a framework to write one in C that would be fast enough. On this machine, running an old kmail, which is single threaded, kmail simply freezes when it goes out on the net to pop incoming email, and that can be 30 seconds to a minute. So, years ago, I wrote a bash script to watch the incoming /var/spool/mail directory where a separate fetchmail/procmail chain deposits the incoming mail that gets by clamd and spamassassin, sees the new mail has arrived, and sends kmail a message on the dbus to go get its new mail. Kmail is no longer configured to go get the mail. It can get it, and filter it to the correct "folder" in a few milliseconds per message, all while never missing a keystroke as I type. I used the same idea with some software that hooks a 30 yo computer in the basement up so it can use files on my hd here as virtual disk drives, but has many "channels" in the protocol. One is dedicated to be used for a printer, so if I want a printout of something I am working on, on that machine, I just "list file >/p". Its sent to a raw text file on this machine, and the same basic watchcat script, sends it back out thru the cups version of lp to a B&W laser printer sitting on the Coco3's desk. That $110 printer fires up its drum heaters about 3 seconds after I have my prompt back from doing that listing, and spits out beautifully rendered text at 19 pages a minute, about 20x faster that the previously used Xerox 1650ro could. Both of these scripts run as looping daemons, auto started. And they do it plenty fast enough for the job at hand. Which is why I'd use a bash script to develop the adaptor protocol needed, then make that into a halcomp module. Once thats done, I don't think any lags in the usb would be noticeable. In fact, I think I would see if LCNC can support a third thread that ran at 1/20th the speed of the servo_thread as that would still be fast enough for human reflexes. But I've never tried that, so could well be barking at the moon & chasing cars. :) Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene> US V Castleman, SCOTUS, Mar 2014 is grounds for Impeaching SCOTUS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration & more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
