Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] re:Re: rE: RE:hand jive

I've made simple interfaces between "infinite knobs"
(a handwheel) and a computer by tearing apart a mouse.

Most modern ball style mice have a ball that rolls
between a pair of rollers and a guide wheel. The rollers
have quadrature encoders.

Rather than use the little quadrature encoders I'd cut
a wheel out of thin brass and rig up LED/phototransistor pairs.

One nice feature of this is that <your favorite language here>
probably already can figure out where the mouse is.

This is particularly nice to do from Windows or X, both of which
have commands to reset the cursor to a specific point.


set curpos to center of screen
move cursor to center of screen
forever
{
read cursor position;
compute delta from center of screen, and add delta to curpos;
move cursor to center of screen;
sleep a short while;
}

Can one of the EMC folks clue us in about what inputs EMC wants as "jog" commands?
Anything besides keystrokes?