Using Path Pilot for CNC Upgrades

Seeing PathPilot is LinuxCNC are there any rules from a legal standpoint regarding using it to support conversions for customers that don't own a Tormach? Seeing the interface at this point is well supported in the CNC community I think this might be a solution to the more basic interfaces currently available in LinuxCNC.

What is stopping the LinuxCNC dev community from just offering the PathPilot skin as a default option in LinuxCNC?

Tormach have an obligation to offer their source but that does not mean they have to make it easy to use on different hardware.
I've never understood why people want to use it on non-Tormach hardware. It might make sense if you do own a Tormach machine already. LIfe is much easier if you use one of the standard GUI's
Surely some of the newer GUI's are equally as capable? Have a look at QTdragon as an example. It has everything you could conceivbly want. Choice of probing optoins, conversational machining, Great documentation, no restrictions.

CNC4Life wrote:

What is stopping the LinuxCNC dev community from just offering the PathPilot skin as a default option in LinuxCNC?

snowgoer540 wrote:

Copyright on the images and such that they created, as I understand it.

Rod has a point. The interface is so geared toward their machines, boards, upgrade methods, etc. I'm not sure why you'd choose to go the PathPilot route on a non-Tormach machine.

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Thanks for the support. A liitle birdie told me you are also a Tormach owner as well as a QTplasmac developer so its appreciated...

WHY PathPilot ?? Because Tormach has skin in the game. It is consistant AND has a presence in the CNC world so it is important that PP works and that Tormach will be using in for the near future .

How many times in the past have you seen LinuxCNC versions come and GO when the authors get tired of all the hard work and just leave everyone to fend for themselves. Then the next super dooper version comes to life and teh cycle starts all over again.

So far Tormach is one of only a few versions that has been fully supported and remains so. ( And seeing that Tormach has to depend on PathPilot so sell machines they will continue to support it unitl they change the GAME and fully develope their OWN operating system OR switch over to a commercial controller.

For now as long as you stay inside of the PathPilot /Tormach parameters you get a fully supported controller at little to no cost . So why would you NOT select PathPilot and the Tormach model for your hobby mahine ???

( TP

Have you looked at qtdragon recently?
linuxcnc.org/docs/devel/html/gui/qtdragon.html
My bug report was resolved with a workaround in 24 hours this week.
Nice modern interface, choice of probing, VFD spindle support

And today after a couple of weeks Debian fobbed me of on an issue i raised for our community reminding me they offered no warranty.

Linuxcnc is one of the few open source applications that is not subsidised by a closed source supported version and it shows. Its a great shame.
The speed with which technology is changing where upstream issues overtakes us is a bit alarming...

HIYA Rod, Couple of questions about QTDragon. Does it use hotkeys. IS the screenset editable.

( TP

Yes the screenset is editable using qtdesigner. cmorley, one of the developers has spent all day for me fixing some bugs in the embeddable panel handling I found.. After that, I managed to get a panel built. Still got a lot to do about formatting. Working with panels seperates your customisation from the core code so its maintained for you. But I thought this is not a bad start in one day. 
 
It does have a few hotkeys but remember its designed for touch screens so they are not needed. I think context sensitive pop up keyboards can also be enabled.
Hopefully I'll get this connected up tomorrow and one last issue with the spindle fixed. My probe should arrive later in the week.

 

Thanks for all the great replies! I partially made this thread because I knew people were visiting Tormach for the LinuxCNC meetup. 

I have used other interfaces and the Tormach interfaces while pointed at their machines are very slick and it is easy to find videos online for users. Plus a VMC is a VMC a lathe is a Lathe. So, what machine it was designed for doesn't really matter unless you want to get to a really big machine.

I have purchased a USB drive from Tormach and used it on personal machines, but not any customer machines. I usually GMOCcapy which works but is missing features and feels kind of dated. I have also used Probe Basic as well but had issues with new hardware getting some of the components to work. I had to build from source and it is a hard no go using an arm controller. I'll look at QTDragon see how it goes.