Needing a control pendant for his CNC machine, [Bob Davis] took to his scrap bin and started looking for parts. What he came up with is pretty cool — that’s a rather old Zenith TV remote providing the enclosure!
When building a homemade CNC machine, many people overlook one of the most handy components — the control pendant. On a commercial machine, they can get pretty pricey — on a homemade machine, most people just use the computer to control it, but if you’ve used a pendant before you know how handy they are for manual operations!
So what should you do? Well, you could make a second dedicated keyboard for your CNC machine (arguably not much of a hack, but rather clever) — or you could build a pendant from scratch like [Bob] did. It’s pretty simple; he’s using a 555 timer, a few momentary toggle switches, an LED, and plans to add a potentiometer in the future for speed control. It’s all housed in the old TV remote, and seems to do the trick just fine — take a look in the following video:
[via Hacked Gadgets]
Whom is it that has a penchant for this pendant? Keeps coming up on top here in my browser.
Just my opinion here, but I do not find pendants the least bit helpful when using Mach3 or EMC2 on a small machine with a keyboard within easy reach. Don’t let me discourage you if you really want one, but don’t assume you are missing much, either.