Well no further progress due to out-of-town business trips and 1,100 sq. ft. of hardwood floor that the wife says takes priority over my hobbies. There was also 1,100 feet of tile and old hardwood that had to come out first.

Right now I have all of the bits to complete the 2 axis setup and have my motors mounted. I just have to wire them up which I will do on a temp basis to test everything out.

Since I couldn't do any hands-on work on my mill, I have been working on my design for a control panel to use with EMC2. Here is what I came up with:



I then bought a $5 USB keyboard and a USB mini-keyboard with built in trackpad. The mini-keyboard is for use in the shop with EMC. The integrated trackpad will eliminate the need for a mouse and mousepad.



I think it will work great with the control panel and a small format monitor of about 8 to 10". Here is what the control panel might look like with a 9" monitor integrated with it. The mini keyboard is just about 1/2" narrower than this combo would be. I'd just put a little shelf for it and have a nice combo.



The cheapo keyboard I bought is a donor for my control panel. The first test was to see if EMC would tolerate the 2 USB keyboards hooked up at the same time. I tried it on my laptop running EMC and it can with either one or both keyboards controlling the software. So I liberated the circuit board from the $5 USB keyboard and spent an evening in the hotel figuring out the pinout of the circuit card for the keystrokes.

The AXIS interface for EMC2 has a bunch of keyboard shortcuts but I wanted to modify some of those shortcuts. I spent some time figuring it out which you can read about here.

One thing I am concerned about is if simply using a dpst pushbutton will properly activate the keystroke combination's. For example, when we do "shift-a" to get an "A", we press "shift" first then "a", whereas a dpst pushbutton will do "shift" and "a" simultaneously, or maybe even slightly in the wrong order. I asked how to get a little delay off of one side of a switch like that (capacitor?) over on the General Electronics Discussion forum. (link) I could remap all or most of the shortcuts to single keystroke combinations, but would rather not have to.

Anyway, I am back home now, but I still have about 400 sq ft of that hardwood flooring to install this weekend and will be out of town again next week. Hopefully I can eek out enough time to test my CNC setup before I go out of town again.