FalconView

Controlcenter for machines controlled by linuxCNC. Subwindows like position or speed override can arranged anywhere around the central preview pane. Alternatively, the status displays can be shown in the 3D preview.

Build

Build-Dependencies

FalconView uses these dependencies:

• linuxCNC - does not work from dev-packages, so you need a source distribution and compile it on your own. Development with linuxCNC works from so called RIP-installation only. (RIP = run in place)

• openCascade works fine from distrubution packages. I use selfcompiled release 7.6.0 from github to be able to debug work.

• Qt works fine from distribution packages as well as from Qt-binary download-center.

  NOTE: You have to use Release 5.xx, as opencascade is not ready for Qt6.xx

• QtCreator - optional. I have pretty good experience with using QtCreator. It's not that powerful than Eclipse (yet?), but it really helps on development and debugging.

• Atom - optional. Very nice editor for markdown files with live preview.

Build-Setup

FalconView consists of several sub-projects. I hope, that separation helps in understanding and may serve as a blueprint for extensions. qmake is not able to handle the dependencies of subprojects, so I migrated to cmake. cmake is a challenge to start with. Its huge, hard to understand and a lot of internal behaviour is not documented, or behaviour is different to documentation ... So I had to find my own way to get what I wanted.

sample directory contains two cmake files indispensable for successful build:

• FalconView.cmake
• FindlinuxCNC.cmake

To get cmake find these files, you have to copy those files somewhere and tell cmake the absolute path of the directory, where you put them.

Edit top-level CMakeLists.txt and change some settings to reflect your system:

• CMAKE_MODULE_PATH to the path, where you put both files from sample.
• CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH to the paths of Qt-toolkit and opencascade.
• OpenCASCADE_DIR is the directory, where cmake files from opencascade are.
• EMC2_HOME base directory of your linuxCNC RIP-installation.

Build ends with a copy stage, which creates a directory dist in your build-tree, which contains all binaries ready to be called without additional commandline arguments. So from your buildroot you can start FalconView with:

dist/FalconView -ini <path to your linuxCNC-ini-file>

Note:

cmake works best with a buildroot outside of the source tree.

Application start

Integrated

FalconView has been created to get integrated into linuxcnc start process, so the call is:

FalconView -ini <path to your linuxCNC-ini-file>

You can add FalconView to ini-file from linuxCNC. See linuxCNC online docs for further informations.

manual start

FalconView could be started manually too:

FalconView V0.1

please specify the path to INI-file of your linuxCNC machine.

supported options:
        -ini            <mandatory>     path to INI-file of linuxCNC
        -help           [optional]      path to FalconView helpfile
        -plugins        [optional]      path to plugin-directory
        -i18n           [optional]      path to translation files

When you start FalconView from the dist directory, you only have to specify the path to your linuxcnc ini-file. All other requirements are found relatively to the applcations executable.

Extending FalconView

Layout variants

default

Preview is a splitted page with 3D-View on top and GCode-Viewer below. Switching to other pages hides 3D-View. Status-Info windows are floatable subwindows, that can be arranged around (fixed) center view or placed at the desktop.

variant 1: status inside 3D-Preview

No more floating subwindows. All status infos are shown as overlay to the 3D-View. 3D-View and GCode-Viewer are still 2 parts of the same page. So changing to another page will hide 3D-View.

variant 2: center is 3D-Preview only

Now the formerly center pages are placed in a floating subwindow, so it can be liberately placed somewhere around the 3D-View or put somewhere on the desktop. As other floating subwindows can do.