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
Graphic Cache	The memory budget for the workpiece's rendering cache

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.

Graphic Cache opens one panel of its own — the memory budget for the workpiece's rendering cache, described under Preferences. The ideal-versus-actual difference is not on this toolbar. A comparison that was actually built shows up instead as a Geometry Difference [radius mm] node on the Control Tree's Program branch, and that node's panel is where its colour-scale Visual Radius is set — a value saved with the project rather than with the browser or the service. The node is there only while a computed difference is attached, so the branch itself answers "did this run leave a difference?"; see The Program Branch.

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 pointer on the canvas moves the camera, and on the tool path it also picks a step:

Gesture	What it does
Click on the tool path, or on a cut face	Selects that step — the same selection a chart click makes, so the Step Info column fills — and, while a Program node is selected in the tree, brings the Program viewer to the step's line, in its own file and pass, switching Follow off
Left-drag	Pans
Right-drag	Rotates
Wheel	Zooms
Hover over the tool path, or over a cut face	Marks the step under the pointer, as hovering a chart does: the charts' crosshair moves to it

A click is judged when the button comes up: it must go down and come up on the same step, within a few pixels, so a hand's jitter still clicks, while a drag that starts on the tool path or on a cut face only moves the camera and selects nothing. A right or middle click selects nothing either.

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. The properties whose value names something rather than measures it are drawn otherwise: Tool ID and FileNo as IDs, and a color tree's key as one lane per leaf; see Tool ID and FileNo and A color tree below.

All three carry a Y-axis range editor in their header, behind a button that reads Auto until you change it. Its three choices are Fit (auto), which follows the data; Lock, a Min and Max you type, after which the button reads them as [min, max]; and Symmetric, about zero with a ± bound you type, which the button shows as ±bound. Locking one is how you compare two parts of a run without the axis moving under you. The Color Index chart hides that button while it plots Tool ID, FileNo or a color tree's key, and adds two controls of its own: the property picker, which is a type-to-filter list of every quantifiable step property, each with its unit under its name — typing mm/min finds the feedrates — and Colors, which edits the colour guide. The machine coordinate of a wrap-around rotary axis picked there, MC.B for one, is drawn between 0° and 360° as the controller's position screen shows it, so a table that keeps turning the same way draws a sawtooth rather than a line that runs off the chart; the step file keeps the continuous angle. 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 — and both of those read the continuous angle the step file carries, not the folded one, so a colour range for MC.B is set against −720° for two turns the same way, not against the chart's 0–360°.

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 where the steps in the window cut — to their whole tool path when none of them cut, or to the home view when there is no tool path yet — 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.

Tool ID and FileNo

Tool ID is the tool in use during a step, cutting or not. FileNo numbers the program as it plays: each program file of the run takes the next number, and so does each subprogram or macro call — every repetition of a repeated call separately — and each jump inside a program, such as a GOTO or the next pass of a loop, so one file can carry many numbers. Both values name something rather than measure it, and picked in the Color Index chart either one is drawn as IDs:

A grey staircase steps from one ID to the next. Each stretch of the run is tinted in its ID's colour, and a band in the same colours runs along the bottom of the plot.
The Y axis lists only the IDs in the window — T16, T1 for tools, the bare number for FileNo — each with a swatch of its colour beside it. On a short chart some labels are left out so that they do not overlap, and their colours still show in the band. Where one pixel column of the chart holds several IDs, only the lowest and the highest of them reach the axis, the tint and the band; zoom in to see the ones between.
The legend reads the ID under the pointer, T3, or the lowest and highest, T1 ~ T3, where one pixel column holds more than one.

The 3D scene takes the same colours: every cut face and every stretch of the tool path is in the colour of its step's ID, and the swatches on the Y axis are the key, since the canvas draws none of its own. A tool ID or a file number keeps its colour — T3 is the same colour in every program and every run — and IDs next to each other get colours far apart. Some IDs further apart come out close — those 5, 8, 13 or 21 apart, as T3 and T16 do below, both blue — and from ID 378 on, two IDs can even share a colour; the Y axis tells them apart. No tool ID or file number is ever red or close to it, since the scene uses red for collisions, and none is a deep blue that would vanish against the canvas background. Colors has no range to set for these two — it reads This guide has no editable range. — and the colour scale bar is not drawn while either of them colours the scene, even with Color Scale Bar ticked under Scene.

A run that cut with five tools, T16 first and then T1 to T4, with Tool ID picked, the canvas in the Isometric view and fitted with Fit view, which frames the cuts, and Tool ticked under Scene so the tool and its holder are drawn. The Availability and Surface Roughness charts are folded, which leaves the Color Index chart tall enough to label every ID.

A color tree

A color tree — one the project defines on the Step Colors root of the Control Tree (Step Colors), or one a mission script registers (RegisterStepColorTree, see Step) — sorts the steps into leaves by conditions on their properties; how a tree sorts them is in Color Trees. Its value on a step is the number of the leaf the step falls into, and picked in the Color Index chart — or made the color index with Set as color index on its panel — it is drawn in lanes:

One lane per leaf, the tree's first leaf at the top. Every lane is drawn whether or not a step of the window fell into its leaf, so the axis never rescales while the run plays, and an empty lane is an answer too. A grey staircase steps between the lanes, each stretch is tinted in its leaf's colour, and a band in the same colours runs along the bottom of the plot, as for a tool ID.
The Y axis names each lane by its leaf — an unnamed leaf by its number — beside a swatch of its colour. A name too long for the axis is cut short with an ellipsis (…); the legend and Colors give it whole. Up to twelve lanes the chart is tall enough for every name; with more, a name without room is left out, as on a short ID chart.
A pixel column that holds steps of several leaves has its tint split into one stripe per leaf, the top lane's on top, while the staircase and the band show the highest and the lowest of them. A tree of more than 32 leaves splits the tint into halves instead, as an ID chart does.
A leaf that shows a value — one given a Value shown on the time chart on its panel — carries a band of that value inside its own lane, in its colour, from the least to the greatest value of the leaf's steps in each pixel column. The band is scaled to the leaf's own range in the window, its least value at the bottom of the lane and its greatest at the top, so its numbers are read in the legend; an overload, an infinite value, sits on the lane's edge, and a column without a step of the leaf leaves a gap. No band is drawn for a physics value while Preference › Show Physics Options is off.
The legend names the leaves of the pixel column under the pointer, the top lane's first, separated by a slash — Rapid / Air / Cut; in a tree of more than 32 leaves, only the top lane's and the bottom lane's, joined by a tilde, Rapid ~ Cut — and gives each leaf that shows a value a row of its own, such as Cut · Max Spindle Power Ratio, with that column's least and greatest value, or the window's when the pointer is off the chart.

A window in which no step fell into a leaf — a tree without a leaf that takes every step, or a stretch none of its leaves takes — shows its empty lanes rather than No physics data. The tint, the band, the swatches and the 3D scene take the colour the tree gives each leaf, which can be any colour, red included; a leaf given no hue takes the colour its number has as an ID. A step that falls into no leaf is a gap in the chart and pale green in the 3D scene, the colour of a step without a value, and the colour scale bar is not drawn.

Colors shows the tree in place of a colour range: Color tree: with the tree's name, In the display range, and a table of the leaves in the tree's order — each with its colour, its name, its Steps and its Time share in the display range — and a No value row when some steps fell into no leaf. Until the chart has read every step's value, the counts read —. Under the table, Edit color tree → opens the tree's panel on the Step Colors root; a tree a script registered has no panel, and reads Registered at run, read-only instead.

The run pictured on Step Colors, at /execution, with that page's example tree, Load check, as the color index: four leaves, Overload, Rapid, Air and Cut from the top, Cut showing the max spindle power ratio. The canvas is in the Isometric view and fitted with Fit view, and the Availability and Surface Roughness charts are folded.

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 the step under the pointer — where a pixel column holds many steps, the first of them, and on a color tree's chart the first step of the column's top leaf — which is what fills the Step Info column, and, while a Program node is selected in the tree, brings the Program viewer to the step's line, in its own file and pass, switching Follow off
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, and marks the step a click there would select on the tool path in the canvas
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. The selected step — the vertical rule across the charts — and the hovered one — the crosshair — stand on every chart in the pixel column that holds the step, whether it was picked on that chart, on another or on the canvas.

Hovering is the light-touch twin of clicking. A click selects a step and fills the Step Info column; a hover only tells the engine which step the pointer is on — the step a click there would select — and the canvas answers by lighting up that step's cutter location on the tool path — a dot with its @index label beside it, a short segment from the position before it ending in an arrowhead that points the way into this position, and a short grey line along the tool axis with a dot at its end — so sweeping the pointer along a chart walks a marker along the cut. A step whose tool tip did not move has no arrowhead — the first step, or one that only turns the rotary axes under RTCP — and neither does a move pointing straight into or out of the screen, such as a plunge seen from above; turn the view a little and it shows. On a tool-change step the segment runs from the old tool's tip to the new one's: the tip jumped with the tool, it did not travel. The marker goes away when the pointer leaves the chart, it is only drawn while Tool Path is on, and a touch screen has no hover, so it never appears there.

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 whole five-tool run from Tool ID and FileNo in the window, Tool ID picked in the Color Index chart 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 — here every one of the 6685 steps — 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, here by its short name T. The transport and the run-state badge sit in the run header at the top of the Control Tree pane, in the left dock outside this picture.

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