English is not my native language so the headline might be a bit obfuscated.
I find myself looking at the screen for the Z-depth all the time. I’m thinking of building a display that can sit on top of the cross-beam where I can monitor the depth of the cut. ultimately I could display all coordinates on the display (or three separate displays)
Another option could be to do a composite device which could double as a keyboard for jogging commands. That way we would have a pendant for both input and output which could operate as a keyboard AND a com port.
either way, adding a ‘serial echo’ or ghost would enable this development.
I’m not sure how you would like to approach the hardware needed for the display you mention, but I can think of two ways to get the data you need with the present setup.
To drive the display from the GroundControl end one can watch the data as it is added to the end of the log.txt file. Each line that starts with a ‘<’ character has a section MPos:x.xxx,y.yyy,z.zzz with the current coordinates. These lines come in several times a second. I routinely have a terminal window up with a tail following the stream on my setup, using grep to extract the part I’m focusing on.
To drive the display from the Arduino Mega end, you can watch that same data being sent as a 5 volt TTL serial stream on the TX pin, Pin1 of the Mega. Use a separate uC to monitor that stream (being careful not to put too big a load on the Mega pin) and drive the display from there.
Yes, That’s exactly what I had in mind.
grabbing the coordinates directly from the serial stream seems like a nice idea - I’m on windows though so intercepting the data to the log file is beyond me. The idea of piggybacking on the TX line though - That’s brilliant. I an just put a resistor in series to limit the load and if it seems to be a problem a buffer circuit could de the trick
BRB - Gone deigning
