A few recent posts on pendants got me interested in getting one. So I got a 19 button keypad from a local store. I’m looking at the shortcut controls in gSender and am wondering which 19 shortcuts would be useful to have. I don’t have my Altmill yet, so I don’t know which ones will be useful for a pendant. Keep in mind that I will also have the gControl computer right next to the Altmill.
6 buttons for the XYZ jog actions (6/19).
3 buttons for the precise, normal, and rapid actions (9/19).
4 buttons for the four “jog XY” actions or the four homing actions to each corner. Not sure which ones would be a better choice (13/19).
1 large button for “Stop” (14/19)
1 button for “Pause”. (15/19). With “Pause”, do I need a “Start” action or will pressing pause a second time restart the job?
That leaves me with 4 buttons for either Start, X0, Y0, Z0, X0Y0Z0, Home, or anything else that may be useful.
For those of you who have one, which actions are the most convenient to have?
I plugged in the keypad to see how gsender interprets the keystrokes. The layouts above won’t work. For example, the 0 and 000 are interpreted the same (0 with numlock on, Ins with numlock off), I’ll need to redo the mapping accordingly. The good part (I think), is that if I use Numlock, I will get a total of 28 possible keystrokes instead of the 19 I initially thought. I’ll post back with what I think will work best.
All right, this is what I got so far. I still have room for 7 actions when numlock is on. If I can’t have an action that is similar to the action when numlock is off, I won’t assign anything to it.
I arranged some of the actions (e.g. Start, Pause) so that they apply whether numlock is off or on. That way, I’ll know an action is applied regardless of numlock status.
All the key labels look great but how do you actually label the keys so they stay put and look decent? If I was to print little sticky labels, I can’t see them staying put for very long.
Not sure yet. I have good quality vinyl sticker pages that I purchased a few years ago and I will give that a try. I used them for labels on spice jars and they stick very well. Not sure how well they will wear on keypads though.
That looks interesting - I don’t have an inkjet printer but please report back how they work out as there maybe something similar available for laser printers.
I wonder if a drag knife on the Altmill would cut these labels accurately enough …
Question for those of you who have their CNC connected to gSender…
If you use a non-programmable keypad like the one referenced in this thread, the keypresses with “numlock on” will be regular numbers.
If I assign shortcuts to those (for example, the number 8), does that mean that whenever I’m in gSender and type in the number 8 as a value in some field, I will also initiate the command assigned to that shortcut?
And if that’s the case, could having shortcuts for the numbers, and also for the /, *, ., -, + keys cause potential issues ?
If the answer is yes, maybe using a programmable keypad would be the better option.
@Chucky_ott Before I went to a tablet and touchportal, I followed @Heyward43 's suggestion to use a USB keypad. I found that, if I used it with numlock on, gSender behaved as you suspect. If I hit the number 8 on my keyboard for some reason, it activated the shortcut.
Ok thanks. In that case, I’ll just use the numlock-off keys and possibly also avoid shortcuts for the maths symbols. That will be the short term solution. I will be looking at programmable keypads or the tablet solution as well.
Couple of questions on gSender shortcuts so that I can design my pendant buttons:
is the “Homing” shortcut the same as going to x0y0z0?
when you press one of the shortcuts to jog, does it keep on going until you press the shortcut to “Stop jog”? Or can you have it jog only while the key is pressed?
@Chucky_ott 1. No. Homing takes you to machine zero. Go to xyz0 takes you to wherever you have set the zeroes for the project you are working on. WRT to XY0, that can be pretty much anywhere, but is generally one of the corners of your material or the centre of your material. Z0 is generally either the surface of your material or the surface of your spoilboard.
2. I can’t speak to your pendant. On my tablet, I have set it so that the LM keeps jogging as long as I am pressing on the gui button. When I release, it stops. If I tap it, the LM jogs one increment.
Thanks. I guess I was wondering what the purpose of “stop jog” would be. I’m assuming if your increment is large, and you want to stop it, or if you select a corner, and you want to stop it.
@Chucky_ott I tend to use stop jog when I’ve messed up, or when jogging doesn’t stop when I release the gui button. I don’t use if often. It’s better than hitting the estop which kills everything. I don’t have limit switches, so hitting the estop means that I have to manually re-zero everything, which can be something of a pain.
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