Where's my AXIS 1.3?

So many great features have been added to AXIS 1.4 that we're going to short-circuit the AXIS 1.3 cycle. In fact, everybody who is running the emc2 package for Ubuntu can upgrade to "AXIS 1.4a0" right now, with apt-get update. The rest of you can head over to the snapshots page for a copy.

What's going to be in 1.4?

• Logarithmic Jog speed control

• "Touch Off" G54 offsets

• Keyboard control of feed override from 0% to 100%

• Lathe Mode with X-Z view and different cone orientation

• "Average speed" display.

• Display of "axis on limit" (symbol next to axis DRO)

• Directive to stop loading the preview plot of an ngc file

My favorite new feature is the Logarithmic Jog Speed control. At Fest, Jon Elson told me that he didn't use AXIS because he couldn't get a slow enough jog speed.

In TkEMC, he could move the jog and feed override sliders both to the left, and get down to 10% of 1 inch per minute (or something like that), while the jog speed slider alone would only go down to 1 inch per minute. AXIS was even worse, letting you go down to 5% of your maximum speed, or 3 inches per minute on a 60ipm machine.

With the logarithmic jog slider, you can choose a huge range of speeds, as shown in the animation above. The speeds range from less than one encoder count or step per minute, all the way up to the maximum machine speed, in about 180 steps. The animation above should give you an idea of the control this gives you.

While enhancing halscope, I wanted to run a g-code program continuously. With O- words this is easy enough to do, but AXIS will continue trying to build the preview plot until you hit ESC to stop it. Now, by adding the line (AXIS,stop), you can control how much or little of the program is loaded for the preview plot. Note that using this feature affects AXIS' determination of the good syntax of the program or that it is within limits. All lines that executed before the 'stop' are checked, but lines after it are not.

"Touch Off" is another nice feature. Instead of hitting Shift-HOME to offset the current axis so it is at 0, "Touch Off" (activated with END) allows you to enter the new axis value in the offset coordinate system. So, when using a feeler gauge to locate the top of the copper for a circuit board, I'll Touch Off to 0.002 inches instead of actually jogging down .002 more and then pressing Offset. Like "Offset", "Touch Off" uses G54 offsets, not G92 offsets.
(originally posted on the AXIS blog)

Entry first conceived on 10 June 2006, 2:31 UTC, last modified on 15 January 2012, 3:46 UTC
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