Mach control input devices...

[davek0974]

Building a new table so it seems a good idea to fix other little niggles at the same time. One of these is the keyboard / mouse.

The keyboard is mostly not used, just a few keys, the mouse gets full of crap and needs space to work.

I thought of a touch-screen monitor but then i lose the jog arrow keys which are far better than the tab fly-out screen in Mach.

I then thought of a keyboard track-pad but these are pretty expensive.

Next up was a keyboard track-ball - this is possibly what i'll get but is there a better method????

I can't fit a pendant as the serial port is used by my THC, so i need an easy method to jog the torch around.


Any ideas

[acourtjester]

Two other ways
Buy the wireless remote from plasma spider very small and has the arrow and page up/down keys. With a finger pad for moving around the screen and a keyboard for typing in instructions http://www.plasmaspider.com/shop/remote.html
If you just want to move the torch around use a X box controller (the wired one, wireless did not work for me) it has about a 6' cord one jog stick for X & Y and another for Z. Plugs into a USB port.

[m_drunk]

or you can roll your own.

https://hackaday.io/project/4044-retrog ... og-shuttle

[davek0974]

nice ideas, thanks,

going to try the joypad with mach plugin first, seems good.

Can g-code be run from a sub stick or does it have to be loaded on the hard drive????

[m_drunk]

sticks work fine.

[exapprentice]

Hi Dave

If your thinking about upgrading the THC and getting it from CandCNC why not go for it and get the PN200 + Hub
at the same time, mine worked a treat

[davek0974]

Thanks

the upgrade is on hold until i see what happens with my existing system, but will add that to the list thanks

[Thor]

I got a industrial kiosk keyboard for mine with trackball. supposed to be dust proof etc (think atm type). a few keys less than a standard keyboard (no pgup/dwn, had to put z jog on diff keys) but seems to be working fine. One of these days I'll make up a place to actually mount it. fleabay was only like $60. so not too much more than a nice keyboard and mouse, and it is single usb plug

[davek0974]

I did a search for that sort of stuff but eBay is a bit empty at present, lots of nice keyboards etc but nothing that jumped out and said "this will work"

I have a joypad on the way, got the plugin installed etc, should work ok but although i see i can trigger the "Load G-Code" button with it, is there a way to select and load a file or not??

Probably needs the mouse/trackball etc as well?

Can code be run from a USB stick or not??

[exapprentice]

Hi Dave

have a look at :
http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from= ... l&_sacat=0

There seems to be a few options that might work for you
Good luck
Regards
exapprentice

[davek0974]

Thanks, some good stuff there