USB haas operator panel interface

Great Project

Have you thought about using a Arduino Pro Micro and the LUFA usb stack ?

That is if the I/O of the ATmega32U4 is enough.

Smart Serial would be the icing on the cake.

This has been my first jump into Arduino boards. I picked the mega because it had lots of I/O as I wasn't sure what I was going to do.
I'm interested in using the STM32 blue pill next - it's smaller and cheaper.
I'll have to look at the pro micro to see what you are talking of - thanks.

Pro Micro has a usb transceiver, no need to bit bang USB.
The LUFA USB frame work is a C library that doesn't depend on the Arduino libs or infrastructure.

Sorry I didn't link to the LUFA stuff
www.fourwalledcubicle.com/LUFA.php

I made a USB device that was enumerated as a Joystick and used it as a pendant, but that was with the BeagleBone Black running machinekit.

It’s possibly worth mentioning that the 7i73 from Mesa can work as a matrix keyboard interface. (And that keeps all buttons in the real-time layer)

I thought the 7i73 was limited to maximum of a 8 X 8 matrix ?

yes it is (and try to find a 64 key matrix keyboard)
- that's what I tried first - panelui in linuxcnc is meant for this.
I was hoping to reprogram the fpga for a larger matrix but that's too much of a jump for me so far...

Besides it still doesn't work as a keyboard for entry (or at least it requires a custom component for the that)

My thought so far; seems to be a few ways to go:

USB HID keyboard what sends weird key combinations for the linuxcnc-related keys, so the screen can catch and interpret though normal keystroke channels.

Two USB HID keyboards (from one keyboard), one would be for normal keys, one for HAL to catch and make pins for.

USB keyboard for normal keys, serial or Smartserial for linuxcnc-related keys

The first one is easiest so that's what I did first.

Chris