Re: Jog wheel

[Brian Pitt <bfp-at-earthlink.net>]

Hi Dale

cycling thru with the buttons wasn't my first choice either but there
were only 4 usable input bits on the game port so the 2 buttons are 
a compromise to fit as much on that port as possible

if you can come up with 2 more input bits somewhere you could
replace the buttons with a couple of 4-throw rotary switches (2 bits ea.)
for X,Y,Z,A axis and .1 ,.01 ,.001 ,.0001 increment 
(or 1000x ,100x ,10x ,1x if you want it to be bi-lingual ;-)

I think some of the panel encoders have a push-to-turn switch built in
as an option ( I may be thinking of some other switches I've seen)
the enable switch could just kill the power to the encoder and buttons ,same 
as unpluging it ,so that part would be up to the guy building the pendant

you could also hook a PIC micro onto the MIDI port of the game connector
there are a few MIDI knob-box plans on the net that would make nice pendants
http://www.uCApps.de/uC_en.html
MIDI is pretty much just an oddball opto-isolated serial port and it will
probably still be around as long as they make game ports or sound cards 

Brian


On Tuesday 04 June 2002 07:10, you wrote:
>   Just my 2 cents worth,
>
> I would not want to cycle through 5 or 6 axis in order to alternately
> jog just 2 of them. I would also frown on having to hold a button down
> in order to use the hand wheel. My preference would be multiple push
> buttons or rotary switch for axis select and jog mode selection. As for
> jog mode, there would be a coarse, medium, and fine continuous jog along
> with incremental. Coarse jog speed would be full speed, medium would be
> at 50% without regard to how fast the wheel is turned or how many clicks
> occur. Turn the wheel and the machine moves, stop turning and the
> machine stops. Fine jog would follow the clicks of the wheel at the
> smallest increment that the machine is capable of. Incremental would
> move the machine at whatever increment is selected for every click of
> the wheel ignoring any clicks of the wheel until the incremental move in
> progress is completed. Axis speed override would be active for all modes.
>
> Dale