Re: Lurking... and learning

Matt Shaver wrote:

> From: "Matt Shaver" <mshaver@...>
>
> > From: Jon Elson <jmelson@...>
> > Maybe, someday, we'll even have
> > conversational programming, but I'm making parts, and loving every
> > minute of it!
>
> Actually, if we made a button or menu item in xemc that would call your
> little gcode generators (maybe even put a GUI dialog box in front of yours),
> we'd have it now! Sure, there's no graphical toolpath display...

Hmmm, yes! I think it would be best to have a user-configurable menu,
which calls up these programs with a spawn process, so that if you manage
to crash one of these programs, it doesn't take EMC down, you just get
a message that the little program crashed. It could always use the same
file name, and give you an option to save the file (by EMC). If you
didn't want to save it, then whenever you ran another code generator,
or opened a G-code file, the one you just created would be gone.
That would be fine for lots of one-off little things like boring an odd size
hole.

The user-configurable menu would let you add programs as you thought of
things. It would really only need to know what you called the function,
and the file name of the actual program. So, you could see a menu entry
like 'Bore Through Hole of arbitrary size', and the program would be
'/usr/elson/writeRS274/makebore'.

A more complex way of doing things (and making it user-extendable
would be much tougher) would be for Xemc to have a menu presentation
for each program, take all the menu entries for it, and then pass that in
the command string. The advantage for this would be that all the menu
entries could remain, so you could just change one entry and the re-run
it. But, the simpler approach sounds like it would be a big plus.

Jon