by Stefan Siegl

PyPC-NC is a GUI application to controll a CNC mill that has a CNCCON axis controller by "Burkhard Lewetz - Ingenieurbüro für technische Software-Entwicklung"; hence it is kind of an alternative to his WinPC-NC software for Windows PCs.

• Python/PySide based GUI application, hence plattform independent
• displays certain machine status information
• automatic reference movement + manual movements
• storing workpiece location (and moving back to its' origin)
• G-Code import & interpreter
• graphical rendering of G-Code on XY plane (bird's eye view)
• polar coordinate based position correction
• CNCCON mock implementation

The G-Code interpreter is far from being fully-fledged (and error-free). But still it supports most of the code popular plugins and free CAM software exports.

Especially the interpreter (currently) lacks support for

• plane switching (currently solely XY plane is supported)
• helical arcs (G2 and G3 code with Z axis word)
• B-splines and nurbs
• boring canned cycles (G84 to G89)
• dwells and dwell-requiring canned cycles (G82, G86 et al)
• tool length & radius compensation
• path blending
• coordinate system selection
• spindle speed override during program execution (serial command C)
• conditional blocks, loop constructs and expression evaluation

Besides block execution is mostly from left to right. Other G-Code interpreters don't necessarily execute left to right.

• mockserial, binds the mock implementation to a PTY which can be provided to WinPC-NC via Wine (thus allowing mock sessions with WinPC-NC)

There is a bug in pyside-uic, caused by use of QButtonGroup and yields "an unexpected error occured" message during make. See https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/PYSIDE-126 for details.

sudo vim /usr/share/pyshared/pysideuic/uiparser.py +212 and replace bg_name = bg_i18n.string by bg_name = bg_i18n.

• G-Code Quick Reference