Mach3 Pendant... Work in Progress

Just a quick update on the progress of the new pendant for Mach3 that I am working on. The PCB has been completed and populated as shown on the right. The empty socket is meant to hold the PIC microcontroller to manage the quadrature signals to the parallel port. This pendant requires a total of 13 input/output so a second parallel port will be totally used up.

I am currently coding the microcontroller codes and it should be completed before this week ends. After full functional test, I'll decide on suitable casing for the unit... probably another acrylic based enclosure...

4 buttons are reserved for Axis+, Axis-, AxisSelect and JogMode... The rest of the other buttons can be mapped to other functions in Mach3...