forum.cncdrive.com

Hi all,
I have been thinking for a while that it would be quite nice to have a small screen mounted on my z axis which would only show a realtime copy of the DRO data from the software. I have been scratching my head for a while now and have no idea how or if this could be done fairly easily. I have had a couple of very vague thoughts involving arduino's or dual monitors but I don't know how I could actually achieve this!
Any ideas?

Option 1) ..... You would need a plugin to send data in your preferred format to something like an Arduino.

When I say format.. that could be serial data, or TCP ip ethernet.

Option 2).... Quicker.... You can use the built in modbus plugin to send data to to an modbus enabled device (eg an Arduino). It would be quite easy and fast with a couple of shields on an Arduino UNO or you could build a more compact solution with a custom PCB or smaller modules.

Thanks Rob, Modbus is something I hadn't considered! Any idea how the raw dro data can be found and sent via modbus? I am taking baby steps with coding type stuff at the moment so I may need it explaining like i'm five!

Open the UCCNC/Documentation folder, you find a PDF document about the Modbus plugin and it's usage.

Modbus in my opinion would be by far the easiest way to do it as the plugin is already written and works just fine.

The next question:
Do you want 1 device to show all axis data?

Or do you want 3 devices showing X, Y and Z data?

(both are easily possible), but its worth working out if you want 3 devices or 1 device?

Next...... how big do you want these devices?

Do you just want to stack an arduino UNO, an modbus shield and an LCD screen shield?

These are just some examples:
https://www.robotshop.com/uk/dfrobot-rs ... QwQAvD_BwE

Now the screens can be a bit of mine field....
Not that they don't work but the time to get a "good" looking graphic display.....
A suggestion is to use something like a Nexiton display

https://nextion.itead.cc/nextion-shop/

So you can use a GUI to create whatever you want graphically and then all the arduino does is translate the modbus to the data input required by the Nextion display.

A rapid development software I use for arduino that is compatible with all of the items is Visuino..... you need Visuino PRO for modbus interface.
https://www.visuino.com/

visuino modbus examples
https://www.google.com/search?q=visuino ... 80&bih=899

visuino + nexiton examples
https://www.google.com/search?safe=stri ... tv1Xo7TiVc

The easy way would be to use a simple serial enabled LCD display. You can then use a simple MacroLoop to drive the display via serial input from UCCNC. No Plugin needed unless you just wanted to write one.

There are ALSO Modbus enabled displays as well with no plugin needed drive it with UCCNC modbus.

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9568 < serial enabled 4x20 display example.

There are MANY different size displays to pick from.

Wow! Amazing response. Thank you so much for all the leads. I feel like this is now within reach as a project and it should be good fun as well. I have a good bit of reading to do (and some shopping). I will try for the one device I think and the visuino stuff looks like it might be possible to to use with my limited coding Knowledge. It may take me some time but I will report back when I have got something working (or perhaps a bit sooner with some daft questions!)

I am happy to help with visuino and also uccnc

If you tell me what hardware you decide on I may have similar hardware which I can use to prototype some code for you as I have a lot of development stuff.

I don't have any nexitron boards though. I ended up going the hard route of pixel bashing (almost)

The reason why I asked about more than one device is with modbus you would set the pc up as the modbus master and then address all of your other boards as slaves with their own address

Thanks Rob. Is there an advantage to using different devices? The little miser in me is saying 'that sounds like three times the cost!'

Yes you can of course.

It depends what type of display you want.

The most basic form of display tends to be a 16x2, 16x4, 20x4 etc screen such as these

https://www.google.com/search?q=20x4+sc ... e&ie=UTF-8