As far as I know, you can freely assign key combinations. Even to these basic functions.
I use the keyboard all the time and find it way easier than say using a mouse while sneaking up on the surface of a board. I even trialed a leapmotion to simulate a touch screen, but then you need your eyes on the screen and not on where the action is happening. Intergration into virtual reality didn’t work out either. VR just isn’t there yet.
You can often find me lying on my machine with a light behind my bit, squinting if I still can see light leaking underneath it, when I need a picture perfect z0. Can’t do that with a mouse or a touch screen., without running into interface problems.
I must be missing something … the keyboard shortcuts for jogging seem to have no correlation to the jog step size as set up in the main page. How can I change the step size for each shortcut keypress?
@Jens I use keyboard shortcuts almost exclusively, so I’m confused by your post. If I set ctrl-x to jog in X+, for example, each press of ctrl-x jogs the machine the distance that is live in gSender when I press it. So, if Precise is live, it jogs the amount that I have set for jogging X/precise. Are you saying that is not your experience?
Edit: Just FYI, I will be splitting this topic shortly. It has moved quite a bit from your original issue.
Thanks for chiming in. I thought that maybe I had a brain wobble so I decided to hook the laptop back to the Altmill. I set the x/y move to 10 mm. i confirmed that if I cllck on the screen icon for jogging, I get 10 mm of movement. If I use the ‘shift + arrow up’ key combination, I get a movement of 15 mm instead of 10 mm. My jog mode is set to ‘normal’
If I switch to ‘precise’ and increase the distance (x/y move) to 1 mm, I get 1 mm movement if I click on the screen icon but I get 6 (!!) mm of movement using the ‘shift + arrow up’ key sequence.
I used the standard x/y movement keys in case I screwed up anything (somehow) when I tried to set a custom key sequence for up/down.
@Jens I don’t have an AltMill, but I can’t believe that it should behave any differently than my LongMill in this context. I just did as you did. I have normal selected in gSender for the jog mode. When I click on the gui X+, it moves 10mm to the right, as it should with my normal setting. I have shift+right arrow as my keyboard shortcut for jogging in X+. When I press shift+right arrow, it moves 10mm to the right - again as it should.
I have taken this to my level of competence (or incompetence ). I have never had an instance where my keyboard shortcut acts differently than the relative GUI action, so I have no solution to your problem.
Just for my information and education, do you by chance have Rapid mode set to jog 15mm on each press?
Sounds like your setup works exactly as I would expect mine to work and I would agree that an Altmill should behave the same as a Long Mill.
Tell me more about ‘rapid mode’ - I was not aware of this mode/configuration. Also, why would a jog move use anything in ‘rapid mode’?
@Jens What do you want to know about “rapid mode”? On the gSender main page, you have 3 modes or levels in the jog control window = rapid, normal and precise. Selecting each of these changes the distance that the machine will travel with each press of the jog control button and it changes the speed at which the machine will travel. I’m sure that you must know this, but it’s the only response I have to your question.
As to why anyone would use anything other than rapid mode, I would have thought that this would be obvious. Rapid mode gets you to where you want to go, with less precision than the other two modes and at a quicker pace.
I’ve noticed that previously, you have mentioned hitting the touchplate with a bit. I would fully expect this to happen if you have the jogging mode set to either normal or rapid - depending of course on what you have set your step increments to. FWIW, when I am jogging in Z to get the bit close to the top of the touchplate, I have the jog mode set to precise. My precise increment is .2mm, so I can approach the top of the touchplate with considerable precision. (I have no quarrel with those here who say that my settings are much too conservative and/or much too slow. They are entitled to their opinions. That said, I have never and will never understand why saving a few seconds on an operation at the risk of bending, breaking or dulling tools is a worthwhile compromise.)
If I have missed the point of your question let me know.
Thanks for clarifying and now I understand what you mean by ‘rapid mode’. I have not yet gotten to the point where I use the mode button but I change the jog distances based on the operation I perform. So, if I was trying to sneak up on z, I would still be in normal mode but I would have changed the z travel to 0.1 mm when I am close to the touch plate.
Back to the original issue though … the jog control is set to regular, the distance for x/y jog steps is 10 mm. Why would the keyboard action of a jog movement be any different than the UI execution of the same command? Is there by any chance a separate setting for the jog distance when using keyboard shortcuts? I did notice that I could change the mode setting with the keyboard but I would assume that I would see any mode change performed via keyboard shortcut to be reflected in the UI.
OK, in rapid mode with a jog step diatance of 20 mmm, my mill does a 25 mm jog when activated through the keyboard.
In normal mode, with the jog distance set to 5 mm, the mill jogs 10 mm when a jog step is requested via keyboard shortcut.
In precise mode with a jog distance of 0.5mm, my mill moves 5.5 mm when commanded via keyboard shortcuts.
There is something somewhere that decides to add 5 mm to each jogging action that is done via the keyboard. That extra 5 mm is not added if I use the UI buttons.
My initial thought was that I must be doing something wrong but it would appear that this is not the case. I will go ahead and file a ticket with Sienci. Thank you very much for your help!
@Jens You’re welcome. There is no reason that I know of why the jog command would differ between using the GUI and using a keyboard shortcut. Sienci may be able to educate use on that.
As I said before, I am going to try to split this topic into the posts talking about jogging and machine movement and those talking about your efforts to get precise cuts in particle board - a difficult task no matter the tooling.
Edit: You mentioned previously that your keyboard combines the arrow keys with page up and down keys. Did you work that out? Do you have shortcuts set up using page up and down?
Edit: You mentioned previously that your keyboard combines the arrow keys with page up and down keys. Did you work that out? Do you have shortcuts set up using page up and down?
Sorry, did not see this earlier.
Yes, I worked that out but of course trying to lower z by 0.1 mm and getting a 5.1 mm movement is a bit of a problem (I don’t recall if it was 5 mm extra, I just know it was more than what it should have been). All my experimenting with this issue was done on the y axis and 'shift+arrow up/arrow down keys. I figure since I didn’t configure that, I couldn’t have screwed anything up
I figured out the 5mm extra yesterday and have broken my head on it for a good while, looking into documentation available and topics related, but come down empty. I cannot imagine a setting that would do this for any reason in any version of g-sender.
It does sound like a software glitch, but knowing electronics, you can never rule hardware out doing weirdest tricks. I’m however not in a position to try and replicate this. I run gsender1.2 on a lb on a mk2. Everything about my setup doesn’t match. What version of g-sender are you using Jens?
However, if my setup would do this I would go down one of 3 forks in the road. One is accepting, second is resetting, third is seek professional help.
Accepting this problem would be a nono for me. The keyboard is essential for my workflow and there is no alternative. So resetting would be my to goto next step, while hoping someone comes up with an answer for a problem that is a first as far as I can see.
I would dive deep into howto reset, the risks involved to make sure I know the process and see if it will correct the weird glitch that shouldn’t excist.
There’s however a 4th fork in the road. Wait patiently for help to come into this topic. But I wouldn’t be able to stay put that long.
@Jens I would suggest that you change the keyboard shortcut keys and try again. Get away from using the up arrow and down arrow keys since you have said that on your keyboard, they mirror page up and page down.
Try using shift, ctrl or alt and a letter.
I’m with @Spamming_Eddie on seeking professional help. However, without trying to prejudice the outcome, it may be difficult to Sienci to propose solutions if they can’t duplicate the problem. FWIW, I certainly cannot.
Both points are valid and need further exploring. @Spamming_Eddie - I use version 1.4.10. As of yet I have not acquired a keyboard dependency so I am ok waiting for Sienci to get around to looking into the ticket I filed. Resetting is an excellent idea that had not occurred to me for some reason. I will give the reset a try … @gwilki - I will try and use a letter combination and see what happens.
Resetting the controller and gSender did the trick ! I am pretty sure I had reset gSender (not 100% sure) but I most certainly did not reset the controller before.
Such a simple thing, so much wasted time
). I have never had an instance where my keyboard shortcut acts differently than the relative GUI action, so I have no solution to your problem.