Hand Pendant

Hello

This may have been covered extensively else where. I need a pendant for my plasma table. The main control station is just too far away for setting the part zero when setting up a sheet. With my present system (not LinuxCNC based) I put a sheet of material on the table and then use the torch mounted laser cross hairs as a guide to move the origin and rotation of the sheet to part/machine zero, I use a crude USB pendant to do this. I am working on a replacement machine controller using LinuxCNC and the GMOCCAPY GUI and need to incorporate a pendant. I don't want to reuse any of the old part parts because there is a good used market for them because the OEM abandon this system after selling it for 12 years.

OK, so these are what I think my options are:

Build my own pendant working from ArcEye's Arduino example using an USB link.

Use an of the shelf hard wired pendant (I have plenty of unused I/O points on my Mesa card) but don't look forward to coping with a 20+ conductor cable and connectors to get the distance I need.

Use a hard wired USB UHC XB04 (flea bay special) and a USB active extension cable (presently used).

Use a RF link UHC XB04 (flea bay special) as examples I have found here.

I am very hesitant about using a RF linked pendant because of the high EMI environment around a plasma cutter. My system is actually really good from an EMI stand point right now but I don't want to tempt fate.

So, what have you used that works? Any good reasons to avoid any of the above options? Will the hard wired USB UHC XB04 use the same setup and SW as the RF one most of the examples use?

TIA

John

I will and another option seeing you are using a Mesa 7i76e. How about using a 7i73 connected via an ethernet cable to the serial port on your 7i76e?


mesaus.com/index.php?route=product/produ...ath=72&product_id=67

You've bought into the Mesa Ecosystem so in my view, it does not make sense to mix and match USB, Arduino or Cheap USB based controllers.

The 7i73 will let you set up an MPG using the LinuxCNC published MPG code.

linuxcnc.org/docs/html/examples/mpg.html

I'm kinda in the same boat. I bought 2 of the MPG encoders and they work well on the 7i76e MPG inputs but I am beginning to think there are better options to allow them to be used remotely.. I am not sure I want to pay the international postage on the 7i73.

Hello

A bump here. I am ready to go with installing my Linuxcnc controller on my table. Actually I have temporarily connected to verify homing and limits. The problem I am having is my table and work flow are very difficult without a pendant. I really don't have the time for another home built project as I am in the middle of my busy season. I tried to get my present one to work but only could read a few of the keys.

Has anyone used a reasonable cost pendant with your Linuxcnc system that you would recommend to another user? What did you use?

John

Depends on what you consider reasonable cost?
This should work (never used one). But you should be able to wire it up to the parallel port.
www.ebay.com/itm/Universal-CNC-4-Axis-MP...6:g:Fn4AAOSwRUhY-fj5

And I am pretty sure there is a driver somewhere for these.
www.ebay.com/itm/CNC-part-Mach3-USB-Hand...4:g:8s8AAOSwA3dYXOxq

Tod

Thank you, I have looked at both of those.

I guess that the Vista pendants are at the top of my desired price range, less than US$200. Has anyone here used one with Linuxcnc?

I am using a Mesa 7I76E card so I have lots of inputs but no spare encoder. I was hoping to avoid having to run a longish 25 conductor cable to my control box. Is the software encoder component fast enough for a hand wheel?

Has anyone used the hardwired USB HBO4 clones that are in the link above?

John

Are you using the 7I76E's MPG encoders already?

The 7I76E (and 7I76) supports 2 MPG encoders via field inputs
in addition to the high speed spindle encoder input.

As rodw mentioned, a inexpensive parallel MPG can be combined with a 7I73
to get you down to a single CAT5 cable (and a lot better noise immunity than USB)

PCW

I am presently using the 7I76E encoder input as a single channel to read a THCad card. I am using differential inputs on the encoder. No MPGs are presently connected to the 7I76E. Can I use the remaining differential inputs as a a second encoder input? How do I configure this? I just plugged in the 7I76E and it worked, the only configuration I did was to set the default private IP address to the 10.10.. range.

My present table controller (Flashcut 3) uses an USB pendant (non keyboard keypad), it has proven to be quite reliable and robust (many trips to the concrete floor). So I am not worried about USB at this point. It does use an active extension cable. I tried to use it with lcnc but couldn't make sense of the key decoding and only some of the keys showed up in the hal.

John

The 7I76Es field inputs 16,17 and 18,19 can be used as quadrature MPG encoder A,B
single ended 5V inputs

7I76 IN 16 MPG ENC0 A
7I76 IN 17 MPG ENC0 B
7I76 IN 18 MPG ENC1 A
7I76 IN 19 MPG ENC1 B

You need to set the sserial mode for sserial channel 0 to "2"
to enable the MPG encoder feature, probably changing the existing
loadrt hm2_eth config string to include "sserial_port_0=20"

PCW

Thank you. It looks from the manual that the two encoder pins are on TB5 pins 1,2,3,4, is this correct?

John

islander261 wrote:

Tod

Thank you, I have looked at both of those.

I guess that the Vista pendants are at the top of my desired price range, less than US$200. Has anyone here used one with Linuxcnc?

I am using a Mesa 7I76E card so I have lots of inputs but no spare encoder. I was hoping to avoid having to run a longish 25 conductor cable to my control box. Is the software encoder component fast enough for a hand wheel?

Has anyone used the hardwired USB HBO4 clones that are in the link above?

John

Here is a video of someone using one. So yes.