Machine Control Events are used to convey to the Machine Tool information about the physical state of the Machine Tool. This may include turning on the spindle at a specific speed and direction, turning on the coolant or clamping the work piece. There is a set of standard machine control events that cover most of the common functions that occur on machine tools. However, there are a great variety of functions on machine tools that are not addressed by the standard set of Machine Control Events. There is a mechanism for you to define your own set of Machine Control Events, User Defined Events. The architecture that underlies Machine Control Events, is the same architecture that underlies User Defined Events. Therefore, all Machine Control Events are defined as User Defined Events. This gives you the ability to modify existing Machine Control Events as well as creating your own.
User Defined Events (UDEs) provide a general mechanism by which the structure of Machine Control Events can become user definable. Once UDE's are created they are then treated like Machine Control Events. They are presented during the specification of the Start of Path, End of Path, and In Path Machine Control Event sets.
The description of the Event structure and the data associated with the Events is stored and is output during postprocessing. All UDE's are defined in a file called ude.cdl in the $UGII_BASE_DIR/mach/resource/user_def_event/ude.cdl. The ude.cdl file defines events and is referenced by the configuration file.
Parameters that are set in the UDE are converted to MOM variables.
All of the standard Machine Control Events are output by Post as events and parameters. Postbuilder will create postprocessors that use these events and parameters. When a non-standard UDE is output by Post during postprocessing a MOM variable is created for each parameter defined in the UDE. It is up to the user to process the non-standard UDE variables. The standard UDE variables are described in the Machine Control Events section.
The order of output of events to either Post or to the CLS is determined by the order of output on the Machine Control dialog. For more information on the order go to the section titled Order Of Events.
Each UDE will be denoted by an ‘EVENT. The text following the ‘UI_LABEL’ is shown in the UDE dialog. The example below is a part of the ude.cdl file that describes the format of the Spindle command. Note that the dialog is created from the contents of the ude.cdl file.