He is a little to modern for my tastes 
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Sorry I am late to the conversation, but one thing I have not heard others mention is a thing I do all the time with my pendant: Manual facing of a piece of rough/warped stock or a new spoilboard. This allows me to push the facing bit as fast or as deep as I can, listening to the spindle in case it begins to struggle, and I can instantly back off on feedrate. If I write toolpaths to do facing, and it hits a high point and struggles, there is nothing I can do but hit the e-stop and start again, or sometimes I have to re-write the toolpath. Manual is much easier, using either the joystick or the jog wheel.
Also:
To turn on my CNC and the pendant takes less than 10 seconds before I can hit Home and get that job finished, and even Z-probe the tool. To boot up the miniPC or laptop, then the sender program, it’s 5 minutes before I can do anything.
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I agree, and if made out of hardwood, even better!
I love this anodized one by Terje Io, the guy who created grblHAL. I believe it controls his lathe.
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That is a SERIOUS pendant, wow!
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Interesting, not sure i would do this. Would love to see a youtube next time you do it!
Oh and p.s. what pendant are you using?
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For a one-off small piece, I have definitely wanted to do this. Easier than going back in the house, drawing the right size rectangle, saving out of CAD to EstlCAM, transferring to machine, etc. etc.
Especially for a new wood where I don’t know what the feeds and speeds would be. I could start slow and move across adjust speeds up as I see fit.
MIllmage would make that easier, I guess if I could have it local to the machine, but I’m not set up for that.
I’ll probably start ordering the stuff this week or so to do a CYD Pendant… maybe that will be what it takes to get me to be able to use my machine more again.
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So can gsender or ugs do this now?
Millmage makes it slightly easier because it has drawing tools inside.
UGS vs GSender vs WebUI is no different for me.
WebUI is easier for me because I have an iPad nearby, but not a computer.
The pendant, I think, would just be easier for me to control the motion.
I actually considered writing a surfacing extension directly into the WebUI just so I could make it directly from the iPad, but that doesn’t really solve the “change speeds at each move across the board” problem if I’m running a file
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Wow that’s awesome. I’m starting to play with grblHAL. Interesting ecosystem.
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In my mind, I am seeing something along those lines - not so complex perhaps, but also incorporating iPad/android pad, in a box with the jackpot, power supply and other elect distribution. The pad would be the mobile pendant, the rest fixed.
My pendant is the one I invented and programmed from scratch to try out the ESP-NOW wireless protocol. I have posts here about it, and a Youtube vid on my channel.
Here is the first time I used it for facing. I am a bit better at it now.
[https://youtu.be/fWiPumdvuXg](Link to manual facing vid)
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BTW, ESP-NOW is Much Easier and more reliable than either wifi or bluetooth. But it only works between two (or more) Espressif microcontrollers, linked by their mac addresses. If I did it over, though, I would just make it wired. Programming it really stretched my coding skills 
Here is my code repo on github
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Neat!! I completely forgot about that pendant!!!
Really? There’s a solid chance it would have been how I tested the pendant 
Yesterday I cut out 6 pieces of MDPE in squares to use as feet for an outdoor shelving unit so it can be dragged around the deck. Solid chance I’d have done that on the router with the pendant lol, although probably ultimately with regret that it would have been saner to just make a proper toolpath. I was using an offcut that they just barely fit in, though, so it would have been a lot of work figuring out the zero anyway, so might as well just layout by hand and drive it into the layout lines…
I’d probably use it that way instead of setting up the thicknesser, too. I don’t know why, there’s just something so much more ‘straight line’, to my brain at least, in the solution of just driving the router directly in some cases.
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I’ll study that, thanks
That is what makes this place so great!!! So many different thoughts all together, combined to make a quorum!!!
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When making pocket mounting holes on the back of hanging things, it is much more precise to use the cnc, plunge, move up and back and then exit the same hole using the special 2 step bit that cuts a narrow slot with the wider slot below the surface to slip over a screw head and slide into place. Doing them by hand was not very easy and i couldn’t see anything with the router table. Pendant for the win.
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Yeah, that’s a great use case. They feel pretty weird to do with a router table, although usually doable with a fence and end-stops. I usually can’t be bothered getting out the big router with the plunge base to do it.
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On the Marlin screens, the knob adjusted the feed rate percentage. So you could easily crank it down to 20 or up to 250% of the original toolpath speed by turning that knob. You should be able to accomplish the same on your pendant. I believe there is a gcode for feedrate multiplier.
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on the M5 dial if you turn the knob while a job is running it changes the “speed” % up or down. I have used this a few times when I guessed wrong in CAM, Works nice and its real easy to change on the fly
I assume the CYD can also do the same but I have not tested this
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