I'm going through a retrofit of an AC Fadal 3016L. I have the mill running perfect with manual tool changes. I just started writing code for the non servo ATC in python. Is python the right method for the ATC or should i go with a different method?
Python is certainly an option, and has the advantage over Classic Ladder that it can very easily cause axis motion to take place. It is also fairly easy to set and read HAL pins. Furthermore it is very easy to configure LinuxCNC to call a Python routine whenever it sees an M6 (or, on a lathe, a T command)
In a HAL component your Python code can interact via HAL pins, send MDI commands and query machine state.
As a remapped routine I don't think that the code can create HAL pins but it can still query machine state. It can also issue canonical commands, which might be an advantage.
You could also consider offloading some of the work to the "carousel" HAL component. That is designed for moving various types of tool carousels to a requested slot position. (Though that is all it does). Carousel works well in conjunction with a G-code sequence, see sim/axis/vismac/VMC-toolchange for a couple of sample configs
If you start linuxcnc from the command line you should see the Python errors in the terminal (command "linuxcnc" )
I tend to use "linuxcnc -l &" to open the last config and return to an interactive shell.
Then you can enter the Python command line, and see what you have.
My suspicion is that HAL_BIT pins are not boolean, so "is True" and "is False" will fail, these are likely to be integer values 0 and 1. Try "==" instead of "is"
(I am not at a LinuxCNC machine at the moment so can't test this theory)
