Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] CNC UI (Virtual hand jive vs. conversational prgmmg)

Wow.. lots of good stuff here

electronic vs. mechanical and handweels vs. buttons vs. joystick
try them all and pick whats best for you
I like spinny things ;-)

wireing in to a dual keyboard adapter would be great for most of the
auxilary functions as well as the standard jog buttons
diging down to the low level scancodes would help bypass the typematic
problem (dosent EMC do something like this already ?)

and you can still run the handweel(s) thru the button bits of the game port
so you can have the best of both worlds.. sort of

mechanical handweels are easy to keep on a CNC conversion if you want
and they do let you feel and hear the cut ,thats still the best way to learn
with electronic handweels you feel the detent clicks as speed feedback and you can hear
how the tool cuts,its realy not all that different
the detent clicks also give position/count feedback without having to look at the dials
or readouts
and with the electronics you can change the jog increment and feed override to ,in
effect ,add a quick change gearbox to the handweel
and of course the machine can now be fully enclosed with a chip/splash shield

to add "real" feedback to the electonic weel would take more work than its worth
but it is posible, ball mentioned medical uses ,I've seen something on tele-operated
surgical robots ,the resercher knew he had the feedback set right when the doctor
put down the control handles and tried poking his fingers at the virtual organs :-)

you can get the feedback control from the current output pin of some servo
amps ,not all amps have this ,its usualy a voltage ~preportional to the motor torque
just feed it to a much smaller motor/amp to make the handweel push back a bit

Ialso liked the idea of using jog with a learn function but would stop short of
coupling axes together for more complex moves ,thats what MDI is for right
once you get used to the codes you can write a short program as fast as you
can think it,a few conversational dialogs and a pop up calculator would help for
trig,polar and unit conversions etc
and a file save option in the MDI editor ,none of the "big boys" seem to have that

I agree with having just one handweel with an axis select switch
the etch-a-sketch example hit it right on the head there
on a CNC machine the handweels are mostly used in setup and only for the most
simple cuts any other time

Matt have you seen these ones ?
http://www.lcdswitch.com

RE:side note
this has been brought up before but you do NOT want to use the "analog"
inputs of the game port, heres why
the analog joysticks use a slide pot as the resistor of the R-C timer in a one
shot circuit
to read the stick position the software writes any byte to port 0X201
the write strobe sets the analog bits (0-3) to 1 ,the button inputs (4-7) are not
changed
now the software goes into a counting loop - pause,count,check bits,?any change?...
if you have to service an inturupt or switch to a realtime task you will lose the count
and could get a reading oposite the real stick position in some cases
now add cheap components,temperature drift,calibration errors,etc..
only use the stick for games,crashing a flight sim dosent hurt as much :-)

I've only used one machine (lathe) that had a digital stick in place of the jog buttons
for X and Z ,it does work but its awkward to use ,kind of like trying to fly the tools around
from outside the plane

Brian -a graduate of handweel conditioning