JCNCScreen

Features

• JCNCScreen is a frontend application for linuxcnc which is published according to GPL 2.0 or later. See file COPYING for details.

• JCNCScreen contains a tool-manager with plugins for exporting tooltables for different applications. These Plugins are separate projects.

• JCNCScreen supports up to 9 axis. Screen controls reflect settings from linuxcnc inifile.

• JCNCScreen is build with java-language and swing for gui, so building and installing might be different to usual linux packages.

• Running JCNCScreen might be different for java applications, as linuxcnc uses shared memory buffers for communication. So JCNCScreen contains a little C-stub that handles all shared memory access. That stub needs to be loaded by the java runtime, so starting JCNCScreen needs special parameters.

Screenshots

Build

• All Projects must reside in parallel directories, i.e. like this:

  /usr/local/src
             |-  JCNCScreen              (mandatory)
             |-  LCExportHandler         (mandatory)
             |-  LinuxCNCExportHandler   (optional)
             |-  CamBamExportHandler     (optional)
             +-  SRExportHandler         (optional)
  

• subproject LCExportHandler should be build first. LCExportHandler is a library containing interfaces and base classes used by export handlers and JCNCScreen. But before building it, JCNCScreen should already have been downloaded. Dive into the projects directory and call

  ant dist
  

  That will build the library and copy it into the lib directory of JCNCScreen.

• Next step is to build LinuxCNCExportHandler. Go to projects directory and call

  ant dist
  

  That will build the export handler and copy it to exHdr directory of JCNCScreen.

• Next step is to build JCNCScreen. As already mentioned, JCNCScreen consists of two parts, the java components and the C-stub. To compile the C-Stub you need a development installation of linuxcnc. Best is a RIP-installation. Go into the directory native from JCNCScreen and add a softlink to linuxcnc like this:

  ln -s /usr/local/src/linuxcnc.git lc
  

  Change the path of linuxcnc to your corresponding location. Be sure, that you have already built linuxcnc successfully.

  Now you can build JCNCScreen. Go to the main directory of JCNCScreen and call

  ant dist
  

  That will compile the C-stub and the java application. On successful build, you find a zip-file JCNCScreen-bin.zip in the main directory of JCNCScreen. That archive contains everything to run JCNCScreen from where ever you want.

Run the app

• Extract the archive to the wanted location, move into it and create the same softlink to linuxcnc installation as before from directory native.

• Then look at subdirectory misc - it contains a little bash-script for application startup. Edit the file and change the path from first line to the directory, where you extracted the binary archive. Then copy the script to a directory that is contained in your PATH environment variable (i.e. /usr/local/bin).

• Finally you have to tell linuxcnc, that you want to use JCNCScreen as frontend. Edit the ini-file for your machine and search the DISPLAY variable from DISPLAY section. Change it to JCNCScreen and you're done.

  DISPLAY section of inifile should look like this:

  [DISPLAY]
  #DISPLAY = axis
  DISPLAY = JCNCScreen
  

Usage

• find a user manual in subdirectory doc

Have fun!