Welcome back VB6

It's only been a few weeks since I went nuclear on my laptop with a fresh install of Windows 10 (it behaves far better than it did following the 8-to-8.1-to-10 upgrade path but is still pretty shonky). It took only a day or two to get all my usual development tools on there - including weird stuff like HeidiSQL, WinSCP, NotePad++, WAMP as well as the usual PIC simulators, ExpressPCB and even Arduino.

But for a long while, something was missing.
I've been messing about with Raspberry Pi and Linux and Arduino and even a bit of Python. But it's taken until now to get VB6 installed on my machine. And it was like putting on an old pair of slippers. Sure, there's a hole in the toe and they're not cool enough to be seen in just popping down the road to the shops. But VB6 is an awesome bit of kit for bashing out apps in a couple of hours.

And Microsoft still haven't found the heart to kill it off.
.NET based applications are slow and bloated and buggy.
VB6 exes just work (and have done since the runtimes were included in Windows 2000). They're lightweight (just a few hundred kb) responsive (no watching the screen redraw as often happens with .NET based cack) and easy to deploy/distribute (just copy the .exe onto your machine and you're done - no stupid 1.5Gb framework downloads here!)

In fact, VB6 proved it's worth in just 45 minutes after being installed. That's how long it took to hack together a quick g-code editor which has massively improved the usability of my CNC router, despite it not having any end stops.

My g-code editor app reads a g-code file and lists each line. You can select any line or lines and apply a "global nudge" - increase or decrease any of the values by a specific amount. You can add a bit to the Z depth (to increase a drill depth for example) or just overwrite the minimum and maximum values for the Z-axis entirely.

But where it really shines, is it allows me to select a block of g-code and it will plot a "bounding box" around the points and create a second g-code file I can just load up into Mach3 Mill.

The new g-code file, before carrying out any of the actual instructions, moves to the top-most, left-most, right-most and bottom-most corners of the highlighted section of g-code, stopping at each point.

This gives me time to inspect the position of the cutting head to make sure it's within the boundaries of the piece I'm working on, before committing to the cut.

It's great for making sure I'm not about to plough through the edges of a guitar fingerboard, when routing the channels on the back. Without it, I'd just have to hope that I'd managed to line up my fingerboard absolutely perfectly when placing it on the cutting bed and I'd have to keep my fingers crossed after hitting the "go" button.

This way, I can take each section (that is cut just above each fret on the fingerboard) and make sure that the cutting head stays within the boundaries of the fingerboard. If it doesn't I'll see it and have change to correct it (using the "global nudge" function) without wasting more valuable rosewood!