Hello everyone,
I have started a new VCP project approximately 4 years ago because I was
very dissatisfied with what was already available in LinuxCNC at the
time.
From a users perspective, the UIs were not usable for 3d printers and
did
not even come close anything visually acceptable by the post-smartphone
era customers.
From a developers perspective VCPs where completely outdated and not
even close to what modern UI toolkits offer. No developer really want's
to work with tk, we can argue about Gtk2.
From an OEM perspective, there was no option to build a close-source UI
on top of LinuxCNC without a lot of effort. Additionally, if the OEM
decides to stay with Gtk2, it's not supported anymore and (almost) no
commercial help available.
That's why I started a completely new approach for creating a VCP
development kit based on QtQuick - which is Qt's UI development
technology.
QtQuickVcp comes with 2 reference UIs:
- Cetus: designed as axis replacement:
https://github.com/qtquickvcp/Cetus
- Machineface: a generic and full-blown 3D printer UI:
https://github.com/qtquickvcp/Machineface
I agree both are not top notch when it comes to UI design. But with a
little effort you can create great stuff with QtQuickVcp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT-tAweP21U
All UIs run on Linux, Windows, OSX, Android and iOS (not in the app
store).
To simplify remote deployment of the UIs one can simply download and run
the "MachinekitClient" (yes, it's Machinekit only right now) and connect
to the machine instance.
This way, it's extremely simple to circumvent the limitations of
embedded computers with weak graphics performance. Use a cheap 100$
tablet as your display and you are fine
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnJv07yeGt0)
To support LinuxCNC would be quite simple. The machine/server part is
based on Machinetalk - an open source middleware.
Basically, it would be a matter of "adapting" mkwrapper, mklauncher and
configserver (Python applications) over to LinuxCNC.
HAL Remote - which is useful for custom extensions would require more
effort, since it depends on the haltalk server - which goes deep into
Machinekit.
From the user perspective, I think the split between LinuxCNC and
Machinekit makes absolutely not sense and is very confusing. To make it
simple: Machinekit is focused on Non-CNC and LinxuCNC on CNC.
Anyway, that's worth another discussion, but for a start it would be
great if we could unity the UI land at least.
UI is driving factor for modern CNC and QtQuickVcp makes it possible to
create modern UIs for LinuxCNC.
Requiring the Qt toolchain, which can be cumbersome to install, is not
an issue anymore thanks to live coding support:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5rYhq06wio
Stay tuned: I also have tools for drag and drop UI and machine creation
in the
making - because I think that's what made Mach3 so successful (despite
the motion control is crap).
Also upcoming thanks to Qt: Web Browser support:
http://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/07/07/qt-webgl-streaming-merged/
If there is enough interest, I will start porting the required tools.
--
Alex Rössler aka. Machine Koder
https://machinekoder.com
a...@machinekoder.com
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