James is more nerdcentric and “in the weeds” than most Also he doesn’t have dog that gets screen time nor does he drop a bunch of dad jokes. I subscribe to a variety of them so I ’m not knocking those channels that do, just pointing out the differences. Think of it as education vs edutainment
We use their larger ClearPath(tm) motors on our large-satellite-dish (12.8m) restoration project. Instead of using the ClearCore board, we use the SC4 comms hub, and their SDK for Linux (and Windows). I ended up writing a little "Motion Server" that uses the ClearPath SDK, but it can talk to Python scripts via XMLRPC. So all our high-level motion control is actually implemented on a fairly general-purpose computer running Linux. Throwing 5.6 tonnes around with relative ease, using 1.1 and 1.5HP motors and adequate gearing. I still get nervous every time we run it :)
Glad to know they make massive clear path motors, wish they would make smaller ones (some places claim they used to make nema17 but they don’t exist anywhere for sale so I’m not sure)
Have you used platformIO in VS James? The ice debugger is supported. If so, what advantages does Visual Micro offer? Those 4D screens are as cute as a button (high, low ...), have used them a couple of times, luxury for doing a front end.
Watching this video, I guess you could say the advantage is Arduino Ide interop, but I see that as a downside. Just let me define my board and libraries in a text file and give me a command I can run to compile and upload.
Besides platformIO not being 100% compatible with Arduino code, can't the Microchip IDE debug some MCUs that platformIO can't easily, like the Chips in the UNO etc? And as it uses the Microchip APIs maybe it can too?
@joseph9915 avr stub, the free builtin, is used for the avr chips such as found in the uno whereas ice is used just for SAM, a nice system in my opinion as it caters to people starting out working with a uno etc that haven't yet started playing with the bigger chips nor made the investment in an ice. And yes it's true the interop isn't 100% but with a tiny bit of file renaming when you setup your project you can be if you need to go back and forth, personally I don't. It's generally a one way trip for me, import the arduino code and that's it.
Back when I was a control system engineer we always tried to find information like this, but it didn't exist. Showing up at a customer site, seeing a PLC, HMI, or SCADA application that you've never seen before but have to fix is an experience you'll never forget. Especially when it happens frequently, because there are so many manufacturers and models still in operation spanning decades. This will be a great video, one that I would have appreciated back in the day, that will have an good impact on others!
How about having the HMI's first rational action after reboot be sending an "I'm alive!" message to the controller. You could then wait for that instead of 5 seconds to know when it is time to start running. Or simply treat it as an event in the event loop that does a state transition from a wait to run mode for the rest of the code. (And have the 5 second wait as an event, so that if you don't see the alive event within 5 seconds you know something is wrong and can maybe try to recover.)
PlatformIO looks like it covers similar ground to your VS Micro approach, except with Visual Studio Code instead of Visual Studio. Not sure if it supports this exact combination of hardware, but it's a lot more commonly used for Arduino-derived projects that outgrow the normal Arduino IDE (3D printer firmware projects are often large enough that they require/expect you to use PlatformIO to build them for example).
On 26:03, why not change the color of the axis name to red, or the entire row when selected? It adds more contrast when viewing at an angle or at distance.
Thank you James. You are getting the functionality of high end industrial equipment at a fraction of the cost. This is great for hobby level installations. I wish there was such detailed instructions for doing the same thing with Rockwell Automation products and stand-alone servo motors and controls. Great work!
*_Another great video that, as usual, went clean over my head. I mean like, jet liner at 35,000 feet over my head. When I finally get my surface grinder, if it doesn't have an automatic function, I know who to call and have come over to work on mine._* 👣👣👣👣👣👣👣👣👣👣
Ok ok I have thought that James is pretty good... but after this video, I now believe there is some genius there! Great video, buddy. Thanks for sharing! Werner
This is why we invented industrial PLC's and HMI's. With those tools (more $$$ to be sure) would be done in a day. Unless you are in it for the learning experience, embedded code is painful!
Yep. Came here to say just that. I would never mess with code like this. Give me a PLC and I'll make anything happen.. but this type of hardware and the coding, debugging and massive headache just doesn't seem worth it. Even the cost of a decent PLC is almost nothing now. You can snag up a productivity 1000 series that can do motion control for under $200. Maybe an I/O card and a motion control card and you're out the door for maybe $500?
very very cool video. if you ever hear from them on how you can get that startup delay down to something more manageable, i'd be interested in that. Because of this video, i'm considering a 4D systems display for a car project, but a 5 second delay from the time the key turns on could be a little too cumbersome. Thanks for taking the time to video all this. This is probably the best advertisement that ClearPath and 4D systems could ever ask for.
Introducing hard coded delay instead of handling NACKs and retrasmitting seems like a bit of a hack. But that probably should've been handled by their library.
Very interesting - thank you. With so much screen real estate available, why not make the DRO bigger? Also, a suggestion: the indicator for number resolution and axis selection seems confusing - why not simply change the digits to another color that both shows the axis selected, and the number of digits that are "in play"?
James, when you were doing primarily, machine tasks. I really enjoyed watching your site. I'm past (All of this stuff) my career with controls. Like PLC plus more.
Very nice. Way more gumption that I have. I'll still sticking with the Click PLC and Maple or C-More HMIs. Protocol level debugging? "Ain't nobody got time for that!"
I would suggest to have a few small motors attached here, or at least a few LEDs to see the motion. Of course "small clearpath" motors are tricky to come by, but I guess you really want some feedback once you get to that stage.
Your issues with the bring-up delay remind me of problems I had with various cheap USB serial adapters. These are often poorly documented, but many of them require some amount of "dead time" after changing any parameters (baud rate, flow control, stop bits) before they respond correctly. Quality serial adapters are better-behaved in this respect, but if you have a script that sets serial parameters and immediately tries to start sending/receiving over the port, you're going to have a bad time.
I was thinking that vscode might be a better option, but it looks like Microsoft has recently given up on the extension for vscode. The community has forked but it remains to be seen if this is viable. Microsoft also removed it from the vscode marketplace and it does not appear on the Open VSX Registry...
Next 'Mate' of mine that calls me a nerd for CNC'ing my mill gets a link to this entire Video series 😂Foolishly I have also started looking at a rotary Auto tool changer for the first 'upgrade' 🤦♂
I have to comment on the button that displays a value on it: I absolutely hate those, because they are not intuitive. Does the value tell me the current value or does it tell me what I will get if I press the button? In real life, BOTH variants appear, so there is no way to know, other than pressing the button and see what happens. Please use two (or more) buttons.
I clicked on this after struggling with some CAD background for a painting and in desperate need of a Clough cooldown. I don’t want any of the stuff you’re building. I gots me own set of problems. Now what am I supposed to do?
I would have just built the UI from scratch using flutter and a cheep tablet. It's easier than it sounds, and cheaper. I've done that before with a pi to interface with whatever board that controls the hardware over Wi-Fi or USB. The tablet can be set up as a kiosk to make it professional
@@metroid031993 I just used the pi as an example. Most cheap microcomputers like the pi would work for just the backend. Like he said in the video, you should not use the pi for the IO you would need a different board for that, and there are a few good options that work well with a pi or something similar.
@@vmiguel1988 Likely not, but what was the purpose of the laughing emoji? Was it your intent to come off as smug, patronising and generally cretinous, or is it simply that your social skills are as worthy of derision as you feel the OPs comment was.
Pick up an Arduino or a pi pico, follow a few basic tutorials. It is really fun to program in the physical world. Lots of info in this video, but yes it is high level. It is also really expensive equipment, so yes the video has limited appeal.
Ok, these last few videos have made my brain hurt. I actually have a degree in less stress treatment. My recommendation to you is you need a new hobby. Something like building a mid 60's muscle car. Something with a small block Chevy. No electronics, all mechanical. Even a dumb red neck dolt can make those things run unbelievably well. I'm going to have a triple shot of Johnie Walker Blue Lable and go to bed. Thanks for the video. I'm sure I'm going to have a nightmare about this.😵💫Oh, and if you have a minute, I have a Tesla CyberTruck in my drivway. Do you think you can determine why my rear view camera washer doesn't spray and cleaner on it?
Man, I'm not sure how you don't have a million subs. I've learned so much from your videos over the years.
For real the most informative "maker" channel on YT. I learned Fusion just by watching James' videos.
@@StanislavG. James is definitely top tier.
Simply because of the wide variety of stuff he covers. Plus some hobby machinists don't like any computer control.
James is more nerdcentric and “in the weeds” than most Also he doesn’t have dog that gets screen time nor does he drop a bunch of dad jokes. I subscribe to a variety of them so I ’m not knocking those channels that do, just pointing out the differences. Think of it as education vs edutainment
We use their larger ClearPath(tm) motors on our large-satellite-dish (12.8m) restoration project. Instead of using the ClearCore board, we use the SC4 comms hub, and their SDK for Linux (and Windows). I ended up writing a little "Motion Server" that uses the ClearPath SDK, but it can talk to Python scripts via XMLRPC. So all our high-level motion control is actually implemented on a fairly general-purpose computer running Linux. Throwing 5.6 tonnes around with relative ease, using 1.1 and 1.5HP motors and adequate gearing. I still get nervous every time we run it :)
Glad to know they make massive clear path motors, wish they would make smaller ones (some places claim they used to make nema17 but they don’t exist anywhere for sale so I’m not sure)
This is, in fact, part 11
Love seeing progress on the project.
Have you used platformIO in VS James? The ice debugger is supported. If so, what advantages does Visual Micro offer? Those 4D screens are as cute as a button (high, low ...), have used them a couple of times, luxury for doing a front end.
I love platformio
Watching this video, I guess you could say the advantage is Arduino Ide interop, but I see that as a downside. Just let me define my board and libraries in a text file and give me a command I can run to compile and upload.
Yeah, platformIO is the way to go
Besides platformIO not being 100% compatible with Arduino code, can't the Microchip IDE debug some MCUs that platformIO can't easily, like the Chips in the UNO etc? And as it uses the Microchip APIs maybe it can too?
@joseph9915 avr stub, the free builtin, is used for the avr chips such as found in the uno whereas ice is used just for SAM, a nice system in my opinion as it caters to people starting out working with a uno etc that haven't yet started playing with the bigger chips nor made the investment in an ice. And yes it's true the interop isn't 100% but with a tiny bit of file renaming when you setup your project you can be if you need to go back and forth, personally I don't. It's generally a one way trip for me, import the arduino code and that's it.
Back when I was a control system engineer we always tried to find information like this, but it didn't exist. Showing up at a customer site, seeing a PLC, HMI, or SCADA application that you've never seen before but have to fix is an experience you'll never forget. Especially when it happens frequently, because there are so many manufacturers and models still in operation spanning decades.
This will be a great video, one that I would have appreciated back in the day, that will have an good impact on others!
How about having the HMI's first rational action after reboot be sending an "I'm alive!" message to the controller. You could then wait for that instead of 5 seconds to know when it is time to start running. Or simply treat it as an event in the event loop that does a state transition from a wait to run mode for the rest of the code. (And have the 5 second wait as an event, so that if you don't see the alive event within 5 seconds you know something is wrong and can maybe try to recover.)
PlatformIO looks like it covers similar ground to your VS Micro approach, except with Visual Studio Code instead of Visual Studio. Not sure if it supports this exact combination of hardware, but it's a lot more commonly used for Arduino-derived projects that outgrow the normal Arduino IDE (3D printer firmware projects are often large enough that they require/expect you to use PlatformIO to build them for example).
On 26:03, why not change the color of the axis name to red, or the entire row when selected? It adds more contrast when viewing at an angle or at distance.
Thank you James. You are getting the functionality of high end industrial equipment at a fraction of the cost. This is great for hobby level installations. I wish there was such detailed instructions for doing the same thing with Rockwell Automation products and stand-alone servo motors and controls. Great work!
*_Another great video that, as usual, went clean over my head. I mean like, jet liner at 35,000 feet over my head. When I finally get my surface grinder, if it doesn't have an automatic function, I know who to call and have come over to work on mine._* 👣👣👣👣👣👣👣👣👣👣
Wow mind blown, I have no idea what you’re talking about or what all the terms mean, but I wish I could understand it.
Sorry man too much for my level of understanding
Stick with it, eventually it will start to make sense
That was really interesting with all the technical details!
I need a drink during and after this!
You get the logo on the display - you know you are the man!
Ok ok I have thought that James is pretty good... but after this video, I now believe there is some genius there! Great video, buddy. Thanks for sharing! Werner
This is why we invented industrial PLC's and HMI's. With those tools (more $$$ to be sure) would be done in a day. Unless you are in it for the learning experience, embedded code is painful!
Yep. Came here to say just that. I would never mess with code like this. Give me a PLC and I'll make anything happen.. but this type of hardware and the coding, debugging and massive headache just doesn't seem worth it. Even the cost of a decent PLC is almost nothing now. You can snag up a productivity 1000 series that can do motion control for under $200. Maybe an I/O card and a motion control card and you're out the door for maybe $500?
Damn, you're a good salesman. As a longtime systems engineer for automotive imbedded controllers, you sure know how to sweet talk a guy.
very very cool video. if you ever hear from them on how you can get that startup delay down to something more manageable, i'd be interested in that. Because of this video, i'm considering a 4D systems display for a car project, but a 5 second delay from the time the key turns on could be a little too cumbersome. Thanks for taking the time to video all this. This is probably the best advertisement that ClearPath and 4D systems could ever ask for.
Introducing hard coded delay instead of handling NACKs and retrasmitting seems like a bit of a hack.
But that probably should've been handled by their library.
Very interesting - thank you. With so much screen real estate available, why not make the DRO bigger? Also, a suggestion: the indicator for number resolution and axis selection seems confusing - why not simply change the digits to another color that both shows the axis selected, and the number of digits that are "in play"?
That old code style reminds me of writing Windows programs for Windows/386 versions before 3.0. That was 34 years ago. We had to do that all the time.
Homage to your dedication
James, when you were doing primarily, machine tasks. I really enjoyed watching your site. I'm past (All of this stuff) my career with controls. Like PLC plus more.
Any particular reason you chose Visual Micro over something like PlatformIO?
Wow, great video!! I can see I need to start watching the discord server.
Very nice. Way more gumption that I have. I'll still sticking with the Click PLC and Maple or C-More HMIs. Protocol level debugging? "Ain't nobody got time for that!"
I would suggest to have a few small motors attached here, or at least a few LEDs to see the motion. Of course "small clearpath" motors are tricky to come by, but I guess you really want some feedback once you get to that stage.
Awesome video!
Do you plan on implementing direct feedback/readout from linear encoders or scales?
😳😳😳😳😳 watching this channel often confirms how little I know
Your are Just crazy, this ist so impressive
There is Visual Micro plugin for Microchip Studio too.
Your issues with the bring-up delay remind me of problems I had with various cheap USB serial adapters. These are often poorly documented, but many of them require some amount of "dead time" after changing any parameters (baud rate, flow control, stop bits) before they respond correctly. Quality serial adapters are better-behaved in this respect, but if you have a script that sets serial parameters and immediately tries to start sending/receiving over the port, you're going to have a bad time.
You really should pick up some real industrial plc motion control and hmi…..
It really looks a mess to debug and test
Awesome work as usual 😂
I was thinking that vscode might be a better option, but it looks like Microsoft has recently given up on the extension for vscode. The community has forked but it remains to be seen if this is viable. Microsoft also removed it from the vscode marketplace and it does not appear on the Open VSX Registry...
How about naming the extension you're talking about? 🤔
Next 'Mate' of mine that calls me a nerd for CNC'ing my mill gets a link to this entire Video series 😂Foolishly I have also started looking at a rotary Auto tool changer for the first 'upgrade' 🤦♂
Could you set background color of xyz number for the selected row?
I have to comment on the button that displays a value on it: I absolutely hate those, because they are not intuitive. Does the value tell me the current value or does it tell me what I will get if I press the button? In real life, BOTH variants appear, so there is no way to know, other than pressing the button and see what happens. Please use two (or more) buttons.
36:50 Someone had too much fun in Visual Studio lol
3:33 aren’t those RJ61? Or 8P8C?
edit: or RJ48, or T568
Excruciating detail, you say? >piques interest
can it do gcode?
I clicked on this after struggling with some CAD background for a painting and in desperate need of a Clough cooldown. I don’t want any of the stuff you’re building. I gots me own set of problems.
Now what am I supposed to do?
I would have just built the UI from scratch using flutter and a cheep tablet. It's easier than it sounds, and cheaper. I've done that before with a pi to interface with whatever board that controls the hardware over Wi-Fi or USB. The tablet can be set up as a kiosk to make it professional
I think you should probably watch the video. He gives plenty of good reasons to use it over just a Pi or other options.
@@metroid031993 I just used the pi as an example. Most cheap microcomputers like the pi would work for just the backend. Like he said in the video, you should not use the pi for the IO you would need a different board for that, and there are a few good options that work well with a pi or something similar.
Understood nothing. Would love a dumbed down version
You’re not the target audience then 😅
@@vmiguel1988 Likely not, but what was the purpose of the laughing emoji? Was it your intent to come off as smug, patronising and generally cretinous, or is it simply that your social skills are as worthy of derision as you feel the OPs comment was.
Pick up an Arduino or a pi pico, follow a few basic tutorials. It is really fun to program in the physical world.
Lots of info in this video, but yes it is high level. It is also really expensive equipment, so yes the video has limited appeal.
Ok, these last few videos have made my brain hurt. I actually have a degree in less stress treatment. My recommendation to you is you need a new hobby. Something like building a mid 60's muscle car. Something with a small block Chevy. No electronics, all mechanical. Even a dumb red neck dolt can make those things run unbelievably well. I'm going to have a triple shot of Johnie Walker Blue Lable and go to bed. Thanks for the video. I'm sure I'm going to have a nightmare about this.😵💫Oh, and if you have a minute, I have a Tesla CyberTruck in my drivway. Do you think you can determine why my rear view camera washer doesn't spray and cleaner on it?
WOW! .....Mind-blowing, development work going on Clough42 Labs. As a fellow nerd. I'm following this build with great interest.😂