Best practice feedrate?

this is one of those "now that I have asked this question out loud, it sounds dumb" moments, which Iahve alot. It's why I love IRC. Sometimes evne when the channel is empty I get my answer... Anyways I will ALWAYS ask for tool settings to bepassed to the subroutine, hopefully I never have a situation where I run out of 30 variables. The (now) obvious logic being that in a file I can simply set a variable #<feedrat> and pass it to each sub individually. then I only need to change it in one place per file, or every sub can be unique and non-ambiguous. The only real issue left is I don't konw for a fact that I can pass a variable to a subroutine, however NGCGUI is happy to do it for me, so hopefully this is defined behavior. Time to go restructure all my subs slightly.

oh and driving it by SFM and IPT sure would be sexy, but my machien doesn't have spindle speed control or a huge range of speeds, so my commands will be less automagical. However when I finally do upgrade and get a VFD and all the other things I dream of, that sounds like a reaasonable idea.

However my original question got misunderstood I think. I was wondering if I have a bunch of subroutines, should they all require I give them a feedrate to operate, or should they all require feedrate be set prior to calling them.

Perhaps not by everyone.

You can of course use a global variable. Or a preamble sub to set the feed rate once and then forget it. If there are no tool changes the feed rate may stay constant at which case just set it once.
Some subs might be called from the main ngcgui sub in which case the feed rate can be passed on with the call.
However I add the spindle and feed rate fields to all subs just to confirm and to edit if I want to use a different rate perhaps for finishing or final pass.

Also if you have the same name for the parameter in all your subs after you fill it out the first time it can automatically be filled in on the remaining subs.

.....
#<feed> = #1 (= feed)
.....


Rick G

I am going the preamble route, as it makes the most sense, and all my subs will accept a '0' input on non-sensical inputs to mean "do not alter current setting". I have very little control over my machine (manual tools, belts for speed, etc etc) so 90% of my worrying is about future proofing my code and learning how to do things "right" now while it doesn't matter.

also in 2.5.3, the sub will accept #<namedparam> as input, however it will NOT accept #<namedparam> inside of NGCGUI. It also wont let me type the letter 'd', it just adds 0.0000 and lets me fill it out like insert, which is a cool feature but I had no idea it existsted and its not in the list of keybindings. what is it and can I turn it off?

It also wont let me type the letter 'd', it just adds 0.0000 and lets me fill it out like insert, which is a cool feature but I had no idea it existsted and its not in the list of keybindings. what is it and can I turn it off?

One of the neat things about ngcgui is that it can return some system parameters.

Take a look at section 7.5 of...
www.linuxcnc.org/docs/devel/html/gcode/overview.html

What is neat about this is you can jog your machine to the location you want your sub to work from say it is x2.13456 y1.654321 z-.254789.
In the field for the X location instead of entering 2.13456 just enter x and it will fill it in for you, same for the rest. This can save a lot of time and is demonstrated in poisition.ngc

d means 2*x=current_diameter (eg for a lathe))

From dgarrett

An example of how to do something similar with axis, ngcgui, and a simple subroutine:

0) specify a subroutine in the ini file or load it from a "Custom"
tab (example attached for position.ngc)

1) Navigate to the position subroutine tab page and
enter "howmany" positions, and other routine entry values

2) Jog to the first position (having a pendant is useful)

3) On the "position" tab page:
put keyboard cursor in the x1 entry box
type "x" (enters current x position)
tab to y1 entry box
type ":y" (enters current y position)

(note: typing x,y,z,a,b,c,d enters the current coordinate value,
d means 2*x=current_diameter (eg for a lathe))

repeat 2) and 3) for remaining positions x2,y2, etc.

4) "Create Feature"

5) repeat 2-4 for additional features if needed

6a) "Finalize"
run the generated program

OR

6b) type Ctrl-a (toggle autosend)
"MakeFile"
save file with a unique name in a location of your choice to run later

The generated program will move to each position and pause (m0) I use this with a quill to manually drill holes at the positions.

With simple modifications, you could modify the subroutine to do anything else instead of pausing, like calling another subroutine.

Rick G

I will need to read that later, spent too long staring at the heater and wondering why everything is so cold today. it is now 45 in the house and dropping. Already miss running water...

anyways it sounds like you can NOT enter variable names into ngcgui. While it would probably be fairly straightforard to ignore magick letters that come after a #<, I am still not too sold on it anyways. Working on a generic preamble in my head, I think Ifinally have a system and made up standard for hte shop, so yay me.