GMOCCAPY

You can add macros to GMOCCAPY, similar to Touchy’s way. A macro is nothing else than a NGC file. You are able to execute complete CNC programs in MDI mode by just pushing one button. To do so, you first have to specify the search path for macros:

This sets the path to search for macros and other subroutines. Several subroutine paths can be separated ":".

Then you just have to add a section like this:

Then you have to provide the corresponding NGC files which have to follow these rules:

The code between sub and endsub will be executed by pushing the corresponding macro button.

GMOCCAPY will also accept macros asking for parameters like:

The parameters must be separated by spaces. This example calls a file go_to_position.ngc with the following content:

After pushing the execute macro button, you will be asked to enter the values for X-pos Y-pos Z-pos and the macro will only run if all values have been given.

You can add embedded programs to GMOCCAPY like you can do in AXIS, Touchy and Gscreen. All is done by GMOCCAPY automatically if you include a few lines in your INI file in the DISPLAY section.

If you have never used a Glade panel, I recommend to read the excellent documentation on Glade VCP.

All you have to take care of, is that you include for every tab or side panel the mentioned three lines:

Here are some examples:

GMOCCAPY has the ability to create HAL driven user messages. To use them you need to introduce some lines in the [DISPLAY] section of the INI file.

These three lines are needed to define a user pop up message dialog:

The messages support pango markup language. Detailed information about the markup language can be found at Pango Markup.

The following three dialog types are available:

For more detailed information of the pins see User Created Message HAL Pins.

Magic comments can be used to control the G-code preview. On very large programs the preview can take a long time to load. You can control what is shown and what is hidden on the graphics screen by adding the appropriate comments from this list into your G-code:

If a file ~/.gmoccapyrc exists, its contents are executed as Python source code just after the GUI is displayed. The details of what may be written in the ~/.gmoccapyrc are subject to change during the development cycle.

A configuration-specific Python file may be specified with an INI file setting

If this file is specified, this file is sourced just after the GMOCCAPY GUI is displayed instead of ~/.gmoccapyrc.

The following example changes the size of the vertical buttons: .Example of .gmoccapyrc file

The widget names can the looked up in the /usr/share/gmoccapy.glade file

Similar to the User command file it’s possible to influence the appearance by cascading style sheets (CSS). If a file ~/.gmoccapy_css exists, its contents are loaded into the stylesheet provider and are so being applied to the GUI.

A configuration-specific CSS file may be specified with an INI file setting

If this file is specified, this file is used instead of ~/.gmoccapy_css.

Information what can be controlled by CSS can be found here: Overview of CSS in GTK

Here an example how the color of checked buttons can be set to yellow: .Example Yellow color for checked buttons

GMOCCAPY supports specifying the level of information (log level) that will be printed to the console and to the log file.

The order is VERBOSE, DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR, CRITICAL. Default is WARNING, that means WARNING, ERROR and CRITICAL are printed.

You can specify the log level in the INI file like this:

using these parameters:

You can specify where to save the log file:

If LOG_FILE is not set, logging happens to $HOME/<base_log_name>.log.

The screen has two main button lists, one on the right side an one on the bottom. The right handed buttons will not change during operation, but the bottom button list will change very often. The buttons are count from up to down and from left to right beginning with 0.

The pins for the right (vertical) buttons are:

For the bottom (horizontal) buttons they are:

As the buttons in the bottom list will change according to the mode and other influences, the hardware buttons will activate the displayed functions. So you don’t have to take care about switching functions around in HAL, because that is done completely by GMOCCAPY!

For a three axes XYZ machine the HAL pins will react as shown in the following three tables:

So we have 67 reactions with only 10 HAL pins!

These pins are made available to be able to use the screen without a touch panel, or protect it from excessive use by placing hardware buttons around the panel. They are available in a sample configuration like shown in the image below.

All sliders from GMOCCAPY can be connected to hardware encoders or hardware potentiometers.

To connect encoders, the following pins are exported:

To connect potentiometers, use the following pins:

In addition, GMOCCAPY 3 offers additional HAL pins to control the new slider widgets with momentary switches. The values how fast the increase or decrease will be, must be set in the glade file. In a future release it will be integrated in the settings page.

The float pins do accept values from 0.0 to 1.0, being the percentage value you want to set the slider value.

All axes given in the INI file have a jog-plus and a jog-minus pin, so hardware momentary switches can be used to jog the axes.

For the standard XYZ config following HAL pins will be available:

If you use a 4 axes configuration, there will be two additional pins:

For a C-axis you will see:

The jog velocity can be selected with the corresponding slider. The scale of the slider will be modified if the turtle button (the one showing a rabbit or a turtle) has been toggled. If the button is not visible, it might have been disabled on the settings page. If the button shows the rabbit-icon, the scale is from min to max machine velocity. If it shows the turtle, the scale will reach only 1/20 of max velocity by default. The used divider can be set on the settings page.

So using a touch screen it is much easier to select smaller velocities.

GMOCCAPY offers this HAL pin to toggle between turtle and rabbit jogging:

The jog increments given in the INI file like

are selectable through HAL pins, so a selection hardware switch can be used to select the increment to use. There will be a maximum of 10 HAL pins for the increments given in the INI file. If you give more increments in your INI file, they will be not reachable from the GUI as they will not be displayed.

If you have 6 increments in your INI file like in the example above, you will get 7 pins:

GMOCCAPY offers also a HAL pin to output the selected jog increment:

To be able to use a key switch to unlock the settings page, the following pin is exported:

GMOCCAPY may be configured to react to external errors, using 3 different user messages:

To add a user created message you need to add the message to the INI file in the DISPLAY section. See Configuration of User Created Messages.

To connect these new pins you need to do this in the postgui HAL file. Here are some example connections which connect the message signals to some place else in the HAL file.

For more information about HAL files and the net command see the HAL Basics.

There are two pins for spindle feedback:

There are three pins giving information about the program progress:

The values may not be very accurate if you are working with subroutines or large remap procedures. Also loops will cause different values.

These pins are provided to use GMOCCAPY’s internal tool change dialog, similar to the one known from AXIS, but with several modifications. So you will not only get the message to change to tool number 3, but also the description of that tool like 7.5 mm 3 flute cutter. The information is taken from the tool table, so it is up to you what to display.

Usually they are connected like this for a manual tool change:

These pins allow you to show the active tool offset values for X and Z in the tool information frame. You should know that they are only active after G43 has been sent.

To display the current offsets, the pins have to be connected like this in the postgui HAL file:

GMOCCAPY offers five pins for tool measurement purposes. These pins are mostly used to be read from a G-code subroutine, so the code can react to different values.

Modify your INI file to include the following sections.

The position of the tool sensor and the start position of the probing movement, all values are absolute coordinates, except MAXPROBE, which must be given in relative movement.

This is not named TOOL_CHANGE_POSITION on purpose - canon uses that name and will interfere otherwise. The position to move the machine before giving the change tool command. All values are in absolute coordinates.

The Python plug ins serves interpreter and task.

First make a directory "python" in your config folder. From <your_linuxcnc-dev_directory>/configs/sim/gmoccapy/python copy the following files into the just created config_dir/python folder:

From <your_linuxcnc-dev_directory>/configs/sim/gmoccapy/macros copy

to the directory specified as SUBROUTINE_PATH, see RS274NGC Section.

Open change.ngc with a editor and uncomment the following lines (49 and 50):

You may want to modify this file to fit more your needs.

Connect the tool probe in your HAL file like so:

The line might look like this:

In your postgui.hal file add the following lines:

On this tab you will find the following options:

Here you can select how you wish the GUI to start. The main reason for this was the wish to get an easy way for the user to set the starting options without the need to touch code. You have three options:

The checkboxes allow the user to select if he wants the on board keyboard to be shown immediately when entering the MDI Mode, the offset page, the tooledit widget or when open a program in the EDIT mode. The keyboard button on the bottom button list will not be affected by these settings, so you are able to show or hide the keyboard by pressing the button.

The default setting is:

This gives the option whether to show the preview tab or the offset page tab when you enter the touch off mode by clicking the corresponding bottom button.

You have the option to select the background colors of the different DRO states. So users suffering from protanopia (red/green weakness) are able to select proper colors.

By default, the background colors are:

The foreground color of the DRO can be selected with:

Default is left move, middle zoom, right rotate.
The mouse wheel will still zoom the preview in every mode.

This will display small pop up windows displaying a message or error text, similar to the ones known from AXIS. You can delete a specific message by clicking on its close button. If you want to delete the last one, just hit the WINDOWS key on your keyboard, or delete all messages at once with Control + Space.

You are able to set some options:

This lets the user select what desktop theme to apply and what error and messages sounds should be played.

By default "Follow System Theme" is set.

It further allows to change the icon theme. Currently there are three themes available:

To create custom icon themes, see section Icon Theme for details.

For the different HAL pins to connect MPG wheels to, you may select individual scales to be applied. The main reason for this was my own test to solve this through HAL connections, resulting in a very complex HAL file. Imagine a user having an MPG Wheel with 100 ppr and he wants to slow down the max. vel. from 14000 to 2000 mm/min, that needs 12000 pulses, resulting in 120 turns of the wheel! Or an other user having a MPG Wheel with 500 ipr and he wants to set the spindle override which has limits from 50 to 120 % so he goes from min to max within 70 pulses, meaning not even 1/4 turn.

By default all scales are set using the calculation:

There are three options to unlock the settings page:

Default is use unlock code (default code is 123).

This settings will have influence on the jog velocities.

Please check Auto Tool Measurement

If checked, the tool in spindle will be saved on each change in the preference file, making it possible to reload the last mounted tool on start up. The tool will be loaded after all axes are homed, because before it is not allowed to execute MDI commands. If you use NO_FORCE_HOMING you can not use this feature, because the needed all_homed_signal will never be emitted.

Select the file you want to be loaded on start up. If a file is loaded, it can be set by pressing the current button. To avoid that any program is loaded at start up, just press the None button.

The file selection screen will use the filters you have set in the INI file, if there aren’t any filters given, you will only see NGC files. The path will be set according to the INI settings in [DISPLAY] PROGRAM_PREFIX.

You can set here the directory to jump to if you press the corresponding button in the file selection dialog.

You can allow or disallow the run from line. This will set the corresponding button insensitive (grayed out), so the user will not be able to use this option. The default is disable run from line.

Some users want to jog their machine using the keyboard buttons and there are others that will never allow this. So everybody can select whether to use them or not.
Keyboard shortcuts are disabled by default. They can be activated by the checkbox

Please take care if you use a lathe, then the shortcuts will be different, see the Lathe Specific Section.

Creating a custom icon theme is pretty easy. All you need is a text editor and of course the desired icons as pixel or vector graphics. Details about how exactly an icon theme is built can be found at the Freedesktop Icon Theme Specification.

Start by creating an empty directory with the name of the icon theme. Place the directory in one of GMOCCAPY’s icon theme directories. Then we need a file called index.theme in the root folder of our icon theme which contains the required metadata for the theme. That’s a simple text file with at least the following sections:

Basically that’s everything needed to create a custom icon theme.

Symbolic icons are a special type of icon, usually a monochrome image. The special feature of symbolic icons is that the icons are automatically colored at runtime to match the desktop theme. That way, icon themes can be created that work well with dark and also light desktop themes (in fact, that’s not always the best option, that’s why a dedicated "material-light" theme exists).

To make use of the symbolic feature, a icon file has to have the suffix .symbolic.$ext (where $ext is the regular file extension like png) for example "power_on.symbolic.png".

With that name, GTK treats this image as symbolic icon and applies some recoloring when loading the icon. There are only four colors allowed to use:

https://youtu.be/O5B-s3uiI6g

https://youtu.be/ag34SGxt97o

https://youtu.be/AuwhSHRJoiI

German: https://youtu.be/DTqhY-MfzDE

English: https://youtu.be/ItVWJBK9WFA

https://youtu.be/rG1zmeqXyZI

Auto Tool Measurement Simulation: https://youtu.be/rrkMw6rUFdk

Auto Tool Measurement Screen: https://youtu.be/Z2ULDj9dzvk

Auto Tool Measurement Machine: https://youtu.be/1arucCaDdX4

If you get strange numbers in the info area of GMOCCAPY like:

You have made your config file using an older version of StepConfWizard. It has made a wrong entry in the INI file under the [TRAJ] named MAX_LINEAR_VELOCITY = xxx. Change that entry to MAX_VELOCITY = xxx.

If you use a macro without movement, like this one:

GMOCCAPY will not see the end of the macro, because the interpreter needs to change its state to IDLE, but the macro does not even set the interpreter to a new state. To avoid that just add a G4 P0.1 line to get the needed signal. The correct macro would be: