GUI's

Hey BigJohn, I am watching your questions about GUIs with interest.
I am keen to know when you have found a way that regular users can easily design thier own screens.
I have tried Mocca but now EMC will not open up without crashes. Possibly because I am booting it under wubi within winows, although it did boot when I hadn't installed Mocca.
Anyway keep asking questions as I am keen to see what you can dig up.

gtom wrote:

Think that Mach (a popular Windows CNC App) is written in BASIC (Visual Basic)

Art Fenerty is a BIG C++ fan. I know that Mach is not written in VB, however the guy who has bought out Artsoft was a VB fan, although I doubt he has changed the Mach3 code to VB either.

You are right, just took a closer look on the Mach3 directory structure, ist was build with Microsoft VisualC++ and uses some OCX Controls and the mfc...
The Mach3 Script dialect is something like Pascal, and the code itself contains lot of emc related stuff... StraightTraverse etc...
Maybe the interpreter is a emc RS274 interpreter ???

Hey Big John, I have re read this thread and had a better look at Mocca too.
Even though I have had limited success with Mocca I can see that it is definately the way to go.
You should be able to achieve any design you want using it. If you do the main design as one big picture and have it as the background, you can then assign buttons, dros, sliders, etc over the top of the background picture.
I imagine the more users of Mocca, the more motive to develop it further.
Can I suggest you start doing a pictorial design using your favorite drawing software, and then we can worry about getting it all working next.
I think you will find Realdraw Pro a great program for creating your screen designs.
www.mediachance.com/realdraw/index.html

PS I have started to work on a design based soley on the graphics. Once done it will be only a matter of assigning the buttons etc over the top of it.
www.linuxcnc.org/component/option,com_ku...d,3637/lang,english/

Yes Mach used some work from EMC way back. Though I'm sure it's very different now.
I remember some talk on the EMC maillist about it.

BigJohnT wrote:

Hey Benny,

I'm more of a nuts and bolts kind of guy and don't worry to much about graphics over form and function. Thanks for the link but that is a windoz program... I guess I need to try out mocca on my virtualbox of 8.04 to see it in action.

John

Yes John do give it a try. You will see that it also provides the nuts and bolts you are looking for, with far less programming than building from scratch.
As for graphics, agreed, but if you are going to need a button, you might as well make it look good with large icons or text included.
I have used realdraw in WINE in the past. It works OK with only a few oddities.
In an ideal world it would be good if EMC had its own WYSIWYG builder included. But Mocca seems to be the easiest way to create a screen in the mean time.