Show me your Custom VCP's!

[ShawnM]

Wow, you went all out didn't you? Looks great. I like the 3D look. It's time consuming but worth it in my opinion. Something to do on a rainy day when there's nothing else to do. I saved a "master" blank button of each color that I used on my VCP so it's easy to add one in the future if needed.

Great job.

[grossmsj]

I love the extra pizzaz you put into the buttons. I tried doing some of that in Adobe Illustrator and just ended up with a lot of garbled text. It seems the VCP has some particular requirements for the SVG format it uses and it didn't like what Illustrator was doing. Since the Dev's use Inkscape there may be better acceptability.
Kudos to pushing the bounds!

[ShawnM]

I use illustrator for all my custom buttons and have not had any issues yet.

[cncbuiltbyme]

I love the extra pizzaz you put into the buttons. I tried doing some of that in Adobe Illustrator and just ended up with a lot of garbled text. It seems the VCP has some particular requirements for the SVG format it uses and it didn't like what Illustrator was doing. Since the Dev's use Inkscape there may be better acceptability.
Kudos to pushing the bounds!

Thanks for the comment. I ended up downloading Inkscape and watched a few tutorials on YouTube. Its not that difficult once you wrap your head around creating vectors and "Object to Path"ing everything (which is a must for clean graphics and text). I'm still tweaking the graphics because I keep on finding better ways to manipulate them. Illustrator is a great app (higher learning curve) and probably overkill for creating simple buttons. Have you tried Inkscape?

[cncbuiltbyme]

Wow, you went all out didn't you? Looks great. I like the 3D look. It's time consuming but worth it in my opinion. Something to do on a rainy day when there's nothing else to do. I saved a "master" blank button of each color that I used on my VCP so it's easy to add one in the future if needed.

Great job.

Thanks Shawn, it sure is time consuming (especially if your not familiar with an app) but I agree with you, its worth it. I was "suppose" to be on the clock but took a day off to complete them. I blame you for that

I love the toggle on/off feature. I did so on a few of the buttons (tortoise and hare, diagonal jogs, cycle start and stop, and the cont and incr jog buttons) and really like the look. Great idea about the blank "master" buttons.

[Sword]

or you could install v5.06

Keith, that button would still need to be changed, as goto_machine_xy0.xml is still using event 67 in v5.06.

[grossmsj]

Have you tried Inkscape?

Sort of, but I'm sticking with Illustrator just to keep up my skills and familiarity with it.

After my initial disappointing forays into making things fancier, I settled on making things simpler. I made one skin just for my Laser and Rotary uses which have some fairly specific needs. This entailed taking out a bunch of buttons I didn't use, and adding a few custom buttons that I now use a lot. I also changed the color scheme to make things less 'anxious'. Then I used the color picker to harmonize colors across the whole screen:

This one feels really good to me, and I've become very comfortable with using it. The only thing that's a gap is trying to match whatever font Centroid used for their buttons with what I'm using for my buttons. I'm close, but stuff like that drives me nuts.

[cnckeith]

The Centroid VCP uses Arial or Segoe UI in their various forms, bold, black, semi bold etc.

Arial was used initially.

Starting few years I have been using Segoe UI instead as i find Segoe UI easier to read in many more situations than Arial.

nice screen set, thanks for posting so other can see what you did.

[cnckeith]

We are working on Adding Rapid Override controls to the VCP and are soliciting ideas on how to implement in the VCP UI for the best UX

one idea is to make the existing Feedrate Override controls also control the Rapid Rate separately or together (as they do now).

when using Separate Rapid Override controls there would be a button that acted like a "switch" to swap the existing controls over to Rapid Rate control and back to Feedrate Control. This switch could be one button that toggled like is on the VCP for Auto/Man controls of coolant/spindle etc.. OR be two separate buttons as show below.

[cncbuiltbyme]

I also changed the color scheme to make things less 'anxious'. Then I used the color picker to harmonize colors across the whole screen

Oh I really like that background color... makes the buttons stick out (great contrast). I may have to try that BG color