I have all sorts of love for the HB04 wireless mpg. I saw there's a new successor:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/CNC-MACH3-Wireless-Electronic-Handwheel-4-Axis-Manual-Controller-USB-Handle-MPG-/201698782859?hash=item2ef62f2e8b:g:whUAAOSwUEVYDeBn Got mixed feelings. A dot matrix LCD is AMAZING, if LinuxCNC could address it arbitrarily. In the HB04, the display is limited, and half of it is taken up by displaying Machine Coords which is of no real value, and can't display the useful messages. e.g. if you press "Run" and the homing hasn't been done it'll mysteriously fail to react and we need to display that on the mpg, but there's no way to do that. But man the button layout is crap. This looks like a deal-breaker to me. There's no symbols and color-coding except "reset" and it's very hard to read what they DID put on it. I'm baffled my "feed +/-" and "spindle +/-" are buttons and not a handwheel mode like on the HB04. And a "shift" key for overloading a second function on the mpg is just flat-out asking for trouble. All too easy to hit the wrong function and that can easily break a job. I wondered about making my own key overlay with new functions and symbols, and make it outstanding. But I don't think I could make one really reliable, just print something out and put packing tape over it. Still can't find a formal name for it, it's NOT "HB05" or anything. In some places they say "UCONTRO" but that's a vendor for breakout boards and stuff. Has anyone made a LinuxCNC driver for it? I did see where, in a different direction, there's "OpenXHC", where people made their own mpg hardware using the HB04's link, but the cheap handwheel hardware on the HB04 is "the good stuff" already. I kinda feel like hacking the HB04 with the same hardware except a dot-matrix screen would be awesome, but realistically the work involved in designing custom hardware and a new protocol doesn't look like a rational use of time. Danny ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Developer Access Program for Intel Xeon Phi Processors Access to Intel Xeon Phi processor-based developer platforms. With one year of Intel Parallel Studio XE. Training and support from Colfax. Order your platform today. http://sdm.link/xeonphi _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
