Re: control panel

[Jon Elson <elson-at-pico-systems.com>]

Ray Henry wrote:

>Erie
>
>Thanks for bringing this issue up again.  The keyboard is handy and works 
>great for testing, but the code and communication channel that it uses is 
>IMO a mess to use to control the motion of a big machine.  Painting the 
><esc> key bright red and putting an estop label on it looks so cheap. <g> 
>
>I soldered together a matrix of buttons with diodes a couple of years ago 
>and fed them into a parport.  I picked up the byte using tkio and a big 
>switch proc in tickle.  The problem was that iosh was not able to handle 
>all of the NML stuff.  I've been talking with Paul about a better 
>solution for NML connectors than the combined emcsh and iosh that I used 
>back then.  Changes to the software aren't trivial but they can and will 
>be done.
>  
>
I'm also real interested in this.  I already have a digital I/O moudule 
that has 17 inputs on it, and the
I/O is funneled through the same parallel port as the motion control and 
auxilliary I/O.  I could add
another DIO card and hook to key switches.  I have been planning to do 
this "sometime" but if some
code was put into EMC for this purpose, it would make things easier for 
me to hook to that.

>There's got to be a good "industrial" approach to IO that gets us beyond 
>the extra parport.
>  
>
Well, maybe my cards are too expensive for everybody, but they take care 
of the problem, and
do everything through one parallel port.  And, they are extendable.

Jon