Watching the Run

A run shows itself two ways at once, and they answer different questions. The canvas shows what is happening now. The strip charts show the whole mission as one picture, so they are where you find out where the interesting part is. Use the charts to choose a moment; use the canvas and the Step Info column to look at it.

Where it is

The Execution page at /execution, in the two middle columns: the 3D canvas with the Session Messages panel beneath it, and the Strip Charts column beside it. Both columns are switched on and off from the quick-toggles on the menu bar, and every panel inside them folds to its own header.

The canvas

What the canvas draws is a choice, not a fixed set. It opens showing the workpiece, the fixture, the dimension bar and the tool path. The machine and the tool are not drawn until you ask for them — which is usually what you want, because a five-axis machine at home position fills the frame and hides the cut you came to watch.

The panel header carries the generic camera control — a View menu of seven presets: Isometric, Front, Back, Right, Left, Top and Bottom — and beside it the four that belong to a run:

Control	What it does
Tool Path	Shows or hides the tool path through the whole program
Path Points	Adds the per-position dot markers along it. Editable only while Tool Path is on
Scene ▾	Which elements are drawn, in three groups
Meshed Geom ▾	The workpiece's rendering-cache budget, and the ideal-versus-actual difference display

The Scene menu groups its checkboxes the way the renderer groups them: Solid — Machine, Tool, Workpiece, Fixture; Coordinate — Program Zero, ISO Coordinate, and Heidenhain Coordinate on a Heidenhain project only; Display Aids — Dimension Bar, Color Scale Bar. The tool path is deliberately not in this menu: its own button owns it, and Path Points hangs off that.

Under Meshed Geom sit two rows, each opening a panel of its own: Graphic Cache, the memory budget for the workpiece's rendering cache, and Diff Visual Radius, which displays the difference between the ideal geometry and the actual one. The second carries a badge reading None or Diff, so the menu answers “did this run leave a difference?” without your opening the row.

Collapsing the canvas does not disconnect it. The panel keeps it mounted and simply stops it drawing, so re-expanding is instant rather than a fresh connection.

The Scene menu open over the canvas at /execution, with the Strip Charts column beside it. The three groups are the ones listed above, and the ticked boxes are the set the page opens with — Workpiece, Fixture and Dimension Bar — with Machine and Tool unticked.

The three strip charts

One group bar drives three charts, and each of them plots the whole mission rather than the current moment:

Chart	What it plots
Availability Chart	Five ratios: yielding stress, max spindle torque, max spindle power, spindle working temperature, thermal yield
Surface Roughness Chart	Re-cut depth, program-side cusp, and tip deflection in X / Y / Z, in µm
Color Index Time Chart	One property you pick, from every step property the run can quantify

Each series is drawn as a band between its minimum and its maximum, not as a line through samples: the window is downsampled to the width it has on screen, so what you are reading is the shape of the run — where the spindle is loaded, where surface quality degrades, where thermal limits are approached — rather than individual values. The values themselves are in the legend panel down the side of each chart, which follows the cursor and can be dragged wider.

All three carry a Y-axis range editor in their header — Fit to the data, Lock to a minimum and maximum you type, or Symmetric about zero with a bound; locking one is how you compare two parts of a run without the axis moving under you. The Color Index chart adds two more: the property picker, which is a type-to-filter list of every quantifiable step property, and Colors, which edits the colour guide. Colors is worth understanding before you touch it: it drives the colour of the workpiece in the 3D scene and the colour scale bar, not the line in the chart.

The group bar

Control	What it does
Range chip	The slice of the mission currently shown, against its total step count
Cursor readout	The x-value under the pointer, shared by all three charts
X-axis mode	Time (s) or Step index, applied to all three at once
Fit view	Fits the 3D canvas to the tool path — the one control here that acts on the canvas
Stick to live end	Keeps the window's right edge pinned to the running end of the mission
Reset display range	Back to the whole mission, and re-arms stick-to-end
Reload	Re-fetches all three charts

Stick-to-end turns itself off the moment you pan or zoom, because both of those set a definite right edge. That is the behaviour you want while a run is going — you can look at something without being dragged back to the live end — and Reset display range is how you re-arm it.

Reading a chart with the pointer

The three charts share one window and one selection, so a gesture on any of them moves all three.

Gesture	What it does
Click	Selects that step — this is what fills the Step Info column
Drag left or right	Sweeps a range and zooms to it on release
Right-drag or middle-drag	Pans
Wheel	Zooms about the pointer
Hover	Puts that x-value in the group bar's cursor readout
One finger / two fingers	Pans / pinch-zooms, on a touch screen

A left drag shorter than a few pixels counts as a click, so selecting a step does not need a steady hand.

Before anything has run, all three read No mission data. A chart that has data but no physics behind it reads No physics data instead — that is what the Availability chart looks like when the run produced no physics results.

The three charts with the demo mission paused part way through and a step selected. The vertical rule crossing all three at the same place is that selection; the range chip on the group bar names the window, the x-axis is in seconds, and each chart's legend stands down its right side with one entry per series — five on each of the first two, one on the Color Index chart, which plots the single property named in its header.

The Execution page's Strip Charts column filled from a paused run: an Availability Chart, a Surface Roughness Chart and a Color Index Time Chart stacked under one group bar, each showing banded series across the mission timeline with a legend listing its series down the right side, and the 3D canvas showing the part-machined block to the left