After a long pause I'm starting back to work on the mill. In the interim I've used the machine to make some small parts for a few projects and even for some wood working where I needed some accurate holes drilled repetitively on multiple pieces of material. I've made no progress on the spindle controller, though it is still on the list of things to finish. During this time I've also discovered that one of the frustrating things about converting the mill to CNC has been the loss of the ability to just walk up to the machine and use it for basic milling/drilling without the need to connect and boot a computer. I don't want to leave my Mach3 laptop computer in the garage, so the setup time has kept me from using the mill as much as I could have. Some people have left the hand wheels installed on their CNC machine axes for this purpose, but with my enclosure it wouldn't be practical. I hate to start a new project with others waiting to be finished, but I see this as a fundamental capability that will help to make the machine more usable. So, the solution I'm planning is to build up a standalone, 3-axis Manual Jog Controller (MJC) (see attached rough CAD models) that will provide "manual" mill operations on X, Y, and Z via the stepper motor interfaces without the need for Mach3; rather it will interface directly to the parallel port BOB, with the stepper motor movements controlled by step and direction inputs generated by the controller. It's basically a narrow box with 3 hand wheels, a display, and an assortment of switches and buttons for the various controls and a microcomputer to pull it all together. This controller will attach to the front of the mill stand, convenient for reaching the work for setups and touching off cutters. This is going to take a while to build, and I plan to cover this in some detail, so it will be broken into small segments. The next posts will cover the overall features, plans, and design for the controller, followed by build progress.