Signalling auto-feeders from LitePlacer

[Oaklands]

It would be nice to have a mechanism to create a signal that lets a feeder know when to advance to the next part. I have seen some discussion about parsing the serial traffic to the TinyG looking for matching GCODE commands, which is fine, but requires additional wiring. (although it should be possible to do this in SW only on the PC)

I am looking at another approach:
- Add some code to the LP software to copy the tape info to the Windows clipboard, every time a part is to be picked up/placed.
- I then have my own application running which is monitoring the clipboard for these values. If it finds one, it clears the clipboard text and advances the feeder as appropriate and waits for the next 'signal' from LP. If the tape/component is not a feeder, then it can be ignored.

It is understandable, that there is no feeder support in LP, because there is no official feeder for LP. You might want to consider a simple ad-on feature like this to make life easy for those who want to install their own feeders.

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I am also currently playing with a related windows app (PNPviewer - see image below) to display the contents of each tape on my LP (visually shows tape capacity & # of remaining components) - so this type of mechanism could potentially have even more uses.