FluidNC LED Musings

[jeyeager (Jason Yeager)]

@waimea

I haven’t read the entire thread but I like where I think this is going. Perhaps the lights could be red when they reach the ends?

I have a lot of ideas now that I’ve seen some of the capabilities of the library I’m using. I may need a normal mode and a fancy mode. Normal mode would be just a color for different states and having a different color that tracks the current position, likely covering the width of the core. It could perhaps change color when it reaches the limits.

Fancy mode could do more interesting things. Like displaying the lights in a wave traveling in the direction it’s moving. Maybe in the alarm state have a flame effect coming from the core.

@Dreyfus

And you know those LEDs don’t have to be in strips - so single LED endstop indicators is on the table too.

I don’t think I have a good way of getting if an endstop is triggered without wiring something to the endstop pins on the Jackpot.

I like @jamiek’s solution to that:

Jamie's LR4 RC2/RC3 Upgrade

Okay here was my secret plan that was a big part of the motivation for the Jackpot box design: Some old filament I had from a long time ago… [20240927_211149] [20240927_211026] [20240927_212121] [20240927_211021] [Front panel endstop lights] There is some utility in this, but mostly I wanted to do this because I thought it would be cool! Top is X, second row is Y, third row is Z. The bottom two are probe and “aux” (rotary home or second X or whatever), neither of which are …

[Michael_Melancon (Mike M)]

@jeyeager

I don’t think I have a good way of getting if an endstop is triggered without wiring something to the endstop pins on the Jackpot

Triggered states should come over with the ? Result.

That’s how WebUI-3 lights up the circles in the status pane when they trigger

<Run|MPos:0.000,0.000,0.000,1.000,1.000|SD:0.1,pcb_zebra.gcode||FS:0,0|Ov:100,100,100|Pn:XY>

the Pn:XY I believe tells you that X and Y are triggered.

I’m just on the simulator at the moment and can’t tell you exact what FluidNC reports. I’m not sure individual switches will show. Might just be one per axis

[jeyeager (Jason Yeager)]

@Michael_Melancon

the Pn:XY I believe tells you that X and Y are triggered.

Thanks. I missed that one in the giant list of things that can go into the status string.

It does appear to be one per axis but that is still be a useful indicator. Even if not displayed directly, it might be good to show some kind of warning color maybe with blinking if an endstop stays triggered for more than a second.

@Michael_Melancon

That’s how WebUI-3 lights up the circles in the status pane when they trigger

I couldn’t figure out what you were talking about. Then I realized that doesn’t happen in my themes. It shows the circles but doesn’t highlight when the endstop triggers. That should be an easy fix.

[jeyeager (Jason Yeager)]

Is there any way in FluidNC to tell if the machine has been homed yet? Showing the X position on the LEDs doesn’t really make sense until the machine is homed.

I thought about maybe using these macros to initialize and set a variable but I’d rather not. I assume that after_homing gets called after any axis is home and I only care about X.

Maybe I just assume you’re going to home the machine. During homing, it could show a wave in the X homing position. I would have to determine which direction is currently homing. I think I can only figure that out by change in X position.

Also, this Youtube series on the FastLED library I’m using is very well done. I’m not sure how many of you care about the code and math behind LED animations but I think it’s pretty interesting. I don’t need to know most of this, but there’s a lot of useful information in there.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgXkGn3BBAGi5dTOCuEwrLuFtfz0kGFTC