Tool Table

[spumco]

Now that I'm getting close to actually using my mill, I can start thinking about more than just wires and pins.

I'm a complete novice so I can't bring much experience to the table when evaluating your tool table or making suggestions.

It looks great and I think I'd prefer it to the existing tool table in UCCNC. What little I've done in Mach3 makes me think I liked having a nice chart with descriptions and so forth.

Looking forward to being the guy who does the "if this idiot can use it, we're in business" testing.

-Spumco

[ger21]

I would think that it's important to work with CNC Drive on this, or all of your work may go to waste.

[cncdrive]

The tooltable is currently internally limited to 96 tools, higher tool numbers are not accepted by the software.
What about placing a macro button which opens the external tool window and in the Load event copy the tool offset values to the table on the window
and in the Closing event of the Form copy the tool offset values back into the UCCNC tool offset textfields and also save the additional informations to the profile file.
In my opinion this way the internal tooltable and the external window could work together nicely and the user could still read the values from the Textfields with the standard Getfield function
and could open up the detailed tooltable only if he needs more info than the offsets.

[alex_s]

The tooltable is currently internally limited to 96 tools, higher tool numbers are not accepted by the software.
What about placing a macro button which opens the external tool window and in the Load event copy the tool offset values to the table on the window
and in the Closing event of the Form copy the tool offset values back into the UCCNC tool offset textfields and also save the additional informations to the profile file.
In my opinion this way the internal tooltable and the external window could work together nicely and the user could still read the values from the Textfields with the standard Getfield function
and could open up the detailed tooltable only if he needs more info than the offsets.

how about you change it to a table in UCCNC with Tool # and some cols for freetext

[ger21]

NOW if we could only change the Picture in the button via script when the tool is changed

Not sure if it'll work, but here's an idea. Make up some two state images for your tools, with the off state transaparent. Assign them to LED's, and stack them up. Toggle them on and off, so that only one is visible at any one time?
Just don't know if the stacking part will work.

[ger21]

OK, I did a quick test, and it does work.
Here's a short video showing the LED's changing with a button press.

http://www.thecncwoodworker.com/uccnc/i ... D_Test.mp4

LED images attached.

[cncdrive]

Hi Balazs, That was one of the options to link the tabel view to the existing fields . On load it simply copied everything over to the table view and IF you modified anything that was related to teh offsets it updated the fields.

Teh other option is to link directly to teh PRO file and ADD new fields to it to store tool data otherwise you would need a new INI or XML file to store the data.

NOW to figure out HOW to do all that Creating the table view was the easy part. I did it as a plugin.

(;-) TP

Hi Terry,

I thought about a combination of these.
I mean to copy the values on the onload and to save the values back on the closing plus save the values also to the profile file,
you can save the Zoffsets to the original tooltable keys in the profile, so then next time the UCCNC will remember them and also your tooltable will remember them.
And I think the best for now is if you just add a fixed number of 96 tools to the table, because that is how many the UCCNC supports now and it is fixed,
so I don't see a need to dinamically add more tools to your tooltable, at least there is no advantage of it for now and it is definitely more complicated for you to code than to just add and populate those fixed number of 96 tool slots.
And you could make your own entry and keys in the profile file and save the additional datas in your tool table there and you can then still load them back on the onload and save on the closing to make those values also persistant.

[Battwell]

Having diameter in the tool table would be really good.
In Mach I use it for vertical feed speed in my drilling macro using multi drill block on the router

[ger21]

If CNC Drive is going to implement G41/G42 at some point, then they should finalize what will eventually need to be in the tool table, sooner rather than later. If they will keep the tool table screen based, then reserve the field numbers now. This will let people add them to their screens now, and use them now in macro's. And it'll also allow Terry to continue on with his custom tooltable, if he has access to all of the fields.