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The New Hotness

  • Kicad-to-HAL: HALUI Components

    The LinuxCNC HALUI “component” has so many pins that I divided them among about 18 Kicad symbols, each collecting the pins related to one function:

    Gamepad Button logic - HALUI components
    Gamepad Button logic – HALUI components

    The Kicad references (halui.mode.100) use periods as separators, not dashes, because HALUI runs automagically and has no thread functions.

    The symbol name (HALUI_MODE) serves as a unique identifier that should match the reference stem. I used underscores just for pretty, but it doesn’t make any difference.

    All of the Kicad symbols include the StripAnno field to remove the Kicad annotation, as described earlier. The Kicad annotations now start from 100, because I’m in the midst of tinkering an automagic way to produce the proper start-from-zero HAL numbering with everything properly sorted; this is very much a work in progress.

    So the full name of the resume pin on the HALUI_PROGRAM component sporting Kicad reference halui.program.100 is just:

    halui.program.resume

    This corresponds to the description of that pin in the HALUI doc, without a numeric identifier: there is only one HALUI.

    The net connecting the gamepad button to that pin:

    net _Gamepad_Buttons_Program-Resume <= input.0.btn-base4 => halui.program.resume

    A few more examples from the nets near the AND2 gate:

    net _Gamepad_Buttons_E-Stop-A <= input.0.btn-top2 => and2.0.in0
net _Gamepad_Buttons_E-Stop-B <= input.0.btn-base => and2.0.in1
net _Gamepad_Buttons_E-Stop-Reset <= input.0.btn-base2 => halui.estop.reset
net _Gamepad_Buttons_Machine-On <= input.0.btn-pinkie => halui.machine.on
net _Gamepad_Buttons_Manual-Mode <= input.0.btn-base3 => halui.mode.manual

    Some HALUI component references include numbers and letters identifying specific joints / axes / spindles, all of which you must edit as needed and none of which should be subjected to Kicad’s renumbering whims:

    X Axis jogging schematic
    X Axis jogging schematic

    The HAL commands producing the nets connecting the AND2 gates to the HALUI pins:

    net N_065 <= and2.14.out => halui.axis.x.minus halui.joint.0.minus
net N_066 <= and2.15.out => halui.axis.x.plus halui.joint.0.plus

    The nets lack any specific name, so Kicad-to-HAL replaces Kicad’s default gibberish with the next integer from an ascending series. If your HAL configuration requires more than three digits worth of anonymous nets, feel free to tweak the format string.