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John,
Funny you should ask, Right now there is no handwheel input to
emc that I know of, but some folks have been messing around with it. I just
ordered a PIC based encoder to RS232 circuit board from here http://home.earthlink.net/~digicircles/
It's not really for a CNC application, but I am just
experimenting now, and maybe if it works ok we can ask the guy who wrote it to
make some changes to the code to add a couple of features. I think it would
be relativly easy to add the code to the User Interface (UI) to read the
serial port every X number of miliseconds when in manual mode and move the
selected axis. What I was thinking, is to add 3 switch inputs and
remove one of the encoder inputs to the circuit. Anytime one of the
switches is pressed, it will send an X, Y, Or Z to the UI where it
will change the selected axis and
reset the encoder count on the circuit to zero. Whenever the
encoder is turned, the UI will read the serial port and send the correct number
of clicks to the selected axis to move. If the jog distance in EMC is set to .1"
one click will move the selected axis .1" I was going to use a 25 count
encoder, 100 in quadrature.
If we add 3 outputs to the PIC circuit, we can have EMC send
the selected axis info back to the handwheel to turn on a light in each switch
giving an indication of what axis is presently selected.
The best thing would be to put the code right into EMC wihout
using the UI, but that is way over my head.
I just got the board today and will be ordering the parts to
fill it in the next couple of days.
Any ideas?
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