Cnc pendant

Hey everyone I’m interested in getting a pendant controller for my MPCNC and almost ordered one off Amazon but figured I would see what yaw had.

Has anyone programmed an xbox360 controller to function as a pendant.

The pendants on Amazon will not work with Marlin. You have a couple of choices. If all you want is a joystick for control, Marlin has built-in logic for a joystick. If you want something more robust, than most of the pendants I’ve seen use a second microcontroller, like an Arduino, and send g-code through serial connections. They are DIY projects, though there are some published designs you can use as a starting point. What control board do you have?

If you use Estlcam as a controller it can do so natively. :stuck_out_tongue:

I use my computer but I want a controller preferably with a joystick for setup and manual facing with the cnc if I wanted to.

If you can get by with just a joystick, then wiring a joystick up to Marlin is the way to go. You did not say what control board you use, but I believe I’ve seen topics on the forum where a joystick has been added to the Rambo board, SKR Pro board, and Ramps board. If you use one of these three boards, these topics will help you identify the correct pins. I do recommend purchasing a decent joystick. I’ve seen a post or two where the OP attempted to use a cheap joystick like this, and they were not happy with the result.

If you search Thingiverse for"MPCNC Pendant," you will find several projects. I created my own pendant and used this Thingiverse project as my reference. An external pendant requires access to a serial connection on the control board. Not all boards have an available serial connection.

Recently Steve Potter opened a forum topic about his wireless pendant.

Thank you sir. I have the full size Rambo board.

The pins for use in the Joystick for the Rambo 1.4 board are documented in the post I referenced above. Also, the serial pins, and how to enable them, is well documented, so either or both the joystick solution and the microcontroller solutions are available for you.

After my last post, I had an idea. It is possible that much of what you are looking for is available in the touch display that Ryan sells with the SKR Pro. If you purchase the exact same touch display, you can flash it with the V1 provided firmware. I’ve not seen a Rambo with one of these displays, but I don’t see any reason why it would not work.

As for surfacing with a joystick, you will have to practice some to see if you can get the right feedrate. Personally, I took a very low-tech approach to the problem. I spent an hour and generated around 30 surfacing g-code files. I had a couple of standard widths of boards, and I authored a series of files for each width that varied by 20mm. I run my jobs off an SD card. I put the files in a subdirectory of the SD card, and when I want to surface a board, I picked the file that matched the board. I’ve purchased a planer, so it is rare that I use these files, but they are still on my SD card ready for use two years after I authored them.

I have an old shopsmith thickness planer but I also just built a flattening sled for my big router so I don’t even think it would be worth me getting a controller now lol

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BCNC has a build-in web pendant. It runs on my iPad. Works great.

Here’s my question… Has anyone made a Pendant that instead of connecting to the board (which would be different for each board, and marlin build), connects to the USB of the Marlin board and sends G-code (like octoprint?).