I'm pleased to announce the first alpha release of AXIS 1.3. AXIS is a modern user-interface for emc2 and bdi4emc. Please visit http://axis.unpy.net/downloads/01145931630 to download AXIS 1.3a1. Jeff ------------------------------------------------------------------------ AXIS 1.3 will contain some important new features. It will support emc2 (tested on HEAD) and bdi4emc (tested on BDI 4.38). It may run on emc1, but this is untested. There's not a firm schedule for the release of AXIS 1.3. However, if you are a translator, please work on updating the .po file for your language. The string table will not be frozen before AXIS 1.3rc1, but I hope that there will be few or no string changes between now and then. Changes since 1.2 ================= When "Open" hangs because of a file with an O-code infinite loop in it, it can be interrupted by pressing ESC. The backplot is now updated every 10ms even when the redraw rate is lower. The colors used in the the plot area can be modified by the X Resource Database. For an example light-background configuration, execute xrdb -merge doc/axis_light_background before starting emc. For the preview plot, arcs are now split into a number of segments that depends on the angle the arc covers. This gives a better match between the preview and backplot for "long" arcs, and uses fewer segments for "short" arcs. The pull-down menus have been reorganized in a more logical fashion For EMC2 "run in place", all files are now installed under the emc2/ top directory, and "setup.py install" can be performed as a user. When appropriate, feed rates are displayed as decimal fractions (e.g., F1.5). The incremental jog distances available can be specified in the inifile [DISPLAY]INCREMENTS. These can be decimal numbers (e.g., 10, 0.1) or fractions (e.g., 1/16). Certain arcs were interpreted by AXIS as being nearly 0 degrees, while EMC treated them as being nearly 360 degrees. This has been corrected for the specific case observed, but it's not impossible that there are still differences (EMC uses a hard-coded "fudge-factor" to determine the angle contained by these degenerate arcs, and it's hard to prove that the behavior of emc and axis will be the same in all cases) An additional effort has been made to make the preview and backplot match for files that don't specify G20 or G21 explicitly. However, the AXIS developers still considers the meaning of such files to be undefined. For the "Open" dialog, the list of extensions and their descriptions are read from the .ini [EMC]PROGRAM_EXTENSION lines. This is intended to allow third parties to write "loaders" (e.g. image or dxf to gcode) which will be called by a flexible [EMC]PROGRAM_FILTER which has not yet been written. This version contains all bugfixes from the 1.2.x series of releases.