EMC Fest 2007

Contents

1. Intro

2. Planning to attend

3. Planning to bring

4. Wish someone else would bring

5. Topics for discussion

6. IRC

1. Intro

As they did last year, the EMC developers will meet at this year's [CNC Workshop], June 11-17, 2007 At Cardinal Engineering, Galesburg, Illinois, USA.

Page on last year's Fest

2. Planning to attend

• Jeff Epler
• Stephen Wille Padnos
• John Kasunich
• Chris Radek
• Steve Stallings - arrive Tues or Wed
• Alex Joni - only online

3. Planning to bring

• SWP:
  • A few computers (at least one with CD recording capability)
  • Some test equipment
  • Webcam of sorts + network hub
• JMK
  • Computers
  • 16 port network switch
  • Networked laser printer (maybe)
  • Test equipment
  • Goodies to swap
• Chris:
  • Computer etc.
  • Paper tape reader/punch
  • Mini servo lathe, maybe mini mill
• Steve:
  • X1 microMill with parallel port stepper drive
  • will try to bring a working touch probe (not sure it will fit this small mill)
• Jeff:
  • computer
  • pluto-p board
  • avr usb hid board

4. Wish someone else would bring

• A laser printer or reasonably fast inkjet
• Machinable wax, spiral taps
• Maybe a mini mill set up for probing

5. Topics for discussion

• Better separation of joints and axes
  • How to deal with this in the config files
  • GUI issues
  • NML/communications changes

• Setup / configuration (again)
  • Unified setup for "EMC" (ini items) and HAL (.hal files)
  • PID Auto-tuner
  • More graphical HAL configurator

• User interface
  • Possible additions to pyVCP or other configurable UI
    • 3D preview pane
    • other things that would allow someone to make a fully functional EMC2 UI without compiling/writing code
  • Remote operation
    • See if we can avoid requiring files to be in identical filesystem locations on remote and local machines
  • HAL Utils
    • Halscope load and save configurations (menubar + "File"?)
    • Halscope save plot data, and offline(?) viewer mode

• Under the hood changes
  • Packaging of dev tools
  • SMP RT kernel option
  • Off-line updating / bulk updating

• HAL changes
  • Larger data types, such as doubles, 64-bit ints, structs
  • Figure out how to separate loading and instantiation of HAL components
  • enums for parameters (and maybe pins), with exportable names somewhere (so a UI can give a human-readable list of options)
  • Automatic thread function ordering. Requires function dependency knowledge.

• Probing improvements
  • What would it take to allow someone to digitize a complex shape without a lot of wasted motion?

• Source code (re)organization (or better documentation of source file locations)

6. IRC

IRC sessions for global participants:

• where: #emc, #emc-devel, #emc-devel at freenode
• when: throughout fest (to add specific meeting times)