CNC Pendant Comparison

hello everyone this is robert and in this video i'm going to be talking about all the different types of control methods you can use to control your cnc machine whether it be a router or a mill or whatever else i'm going to be talking about pendants game pads touch screen keyboards all that stuff and kind of the pros and cons of each one so that you know what the right control option is for you let's get started so why make this video this is definitely not one of those click baity youtube videos where i go through all of these things at the very end i'm just like but this is the ultimate solution if you check now down in the description i have a promo code now that's not what this video is there's a lot of different types of control options and each one definitely has their pros and cons and i don't really use one of these options exclusively none of these are the end-all so if you're watching this video and you're trying to figure out like well what do i really even need these for that's a very good question you're a very astute youtube viewer um realistically these different control options are for everything before you hit that start button the cycle start button that starts your program you're going to need to define the coordinates of your piece so if i'm machining something in the vise you know this is going to be x0 y0 z0 and i need to get to that point and i need to indicate off of that point that's where these things come in i can't just tell the head oh you go over to that place that i want to start the program from doesn't work like that we need to get over there maybe we're going to eyeball it sometimes maybe we're going to use an indicator like a probe something like that but we basically need to jog this machine around and get it to where we need to either cut or start the program from and you can definitely use pendants and things like that to make kind of manual cuts i've done a couple manual cuts on the machine before just by setting the jog rate and things like that we'll get into that later but generally speaking these options are all going to be before you hit that cycle start button after that the machine just kind of does what it does and you're just going to be relying on your monitor or whatever it is to watch it so this is everything that gets you to the setup of that program so that you can hit start so let's start by talking about the first option which is just your basic touch screen so here is my touch screen interface for my avid cnc router this is running mach 4 it is the screen set that comes with avid i just kind of made a couple little tweaks and you can look at this you can see that we can adjust the feed rate rapid rate jog rate spindle override i can control the spindle when it's actually turned on and then over here there is this jogging tab so theoretically i could use my touch screen which is mounted on this lovely little machine arm with this swivel thing i could very easily use this to control the machine for jogging right let's see so i'm going to set my inter incremental incremental jog step to i don't know let's just say tenth of an inch and then i have this set to continuous you can also go to incremental as well there we go this is not a fault of the touchscreen this is a fault of mock i don't know why but you kind of have to double tap and then it works but you can't just like i mean you can kind of do that but it's really annoying this is an awful awful way of jogging the machine around will it work yeah if this is your only option i feel bad for you it is really cumbersome it technically works but it could be so so much better i mean we have phones in our pocket that have really crazy touch and this monitor does have multi-touch it has all sorts of fun features on it this interface is just garbage um it is just terrible you're not going to be able to accurately move the machine around with this there are a lot of other really cool features and i highly encourage everyone to get a touch screen because zeroing out the axes adjusting the feed rates a lot of other things in this screen set work really well the jogging is not one of them not recommended so the touchscreen option is a little bit meh for jogging what about a standard basic keyboard you're already going to have a keyboard if you get a wireless one if you get a decent new wireless one these things can last for like a year on a single battery charge which is pretty cool can they effectively jog the machine around yes they can go up down left right and then page up and page down will control the head of the machine that was moving relatively slowly what if we want to move it a little bit faster you have two options we have the jaw grate that was at 10 percent i can bump that up to 35 percent now it moves a little bit faster what if i don't want to go over to this interface to change it we can hold down the shift key and that will move at full max rapid travel so yeah pretty simple as that the keyboard is a very versatile tool you're going to have one with the machine already and this is what i use for most of my course adjustment right i need to get the head from over there to over there very quickly just hold down shift boom boom it's over there it's a lot easier than a pendant in a lot of aspects and you can assign other hotkeys to it and it's relatively inexpensive and wireless so that is the keyboard option next up we've got the gamepad option this is an xbox one controller i think you can use an xbox 360 and there's a couple different plugins for mach3 and mach4 for different options they're all pretty similar the thing about this option up until now everything else has been just kind of built into your control software the keyboard the mouse and the touchscreen all that stuff is just going to work natively in mach3 and mach4 the gamepad is the first one where you kind of need a plug-in and you do to maybe configure it or get it working separately i've only used this for about a week this seems to be a very popular option i see a lot of other people on youtube using and personally i'm not a fan but i figured i'd include it and go over it just to kind of give you an idea what it can and can't do you can use the d-pad down here to move the machine around very similar to the keyboard move it that way move it that way go back do that the other nice thing like the keyboard you can move diagonally by pressing both of them [Music] it's a little harder with the d-pad but don't worry about it and then over here on the right analog stick we can move the head up and down pretty cool now you might be wondering to yourself you know that's an analog stick can i control the speed and the rate at which the head moves up and down [Music] nope not at all um it is not proportionate whatsoever it is just a button everything on here reads just as a button which is really unfortunate touch screen is the same way the keyboard's the same way but there is no um proportionate control it is either just moving or it is not moving the other nice thing about this though is if you look over here to screen we've got this on continuous mode i can hit one of these buttons i think it's that one these two buttons switch between incremental and continuous so now i am set to incremental and let me go to one inch so now if i hit the button once and hold it it'll just go one inch and then we can use this jog step to go now to a hundredth so we're going 100 we can go to 10th and so on this is i guess nice but if i'm over here at the cnc machine working over here i have to walk over here change this come all the way back here and do this there's just no real way to change it on the actual controller now let's say there was a way to control it like i could hit that button and change it there's nothing on this to indicate what that is so i'm still going to have to look back over to this little box right there and see what it is granted i could change my screen set things like that whatever it's just not my favorite option if i'm not going to get the force feedback i don't know if i'm going to have a keyboard and a gamepad i'm probably just going to pick up the keyboard like i always do and do what i already do with the keyboard so the gamepad it's fine um and it can work wirelessly i don't have it hooked up wirelessly but you can use this wirelessly so if you already have a game pad on hand maybe just kind of plug it in try it out and see what you think but i am not that big of a fan so i'm over here at the tormach to show you another control option this is the shuttle express this is made by contour design this is a tormach branded version of it it came with my whole package and they really like it for a smaller machine if you're using this with a bigger machine like the avid cnc router and maybe it'll be a little frustrating to move the machine quickly but i think for a smaller machine it works out really really well let me explain how it works you have this inner circle right here which has little physical detents in them you can't feel but like that's a step that's a step that's a step it actually has physical steps to it and then this outer ring actually is kind of spring-loaded and wants to return back to center and it can go let me select an axis here oops you can go very fast or you can go very slow and it's very much proportional and gives you very fine control and you basically select i want the x-axis move it over like that fast slow fast slow or the y the z whatever you want it doesn't have a readout or a screen and is definitely made to be used like that it's meant to be used with your hand down on a table it is wired there isn't a wireless option and generally with a machine like this i'm going to be facing the machine looking at the machine over here i have the screen readout right there and then i'm just going to be controlling it with this pendant and that is the nice way to use it if you're using it on something like a cnc router without having that feedback without looking at it this step button which changes the step size on here you're just going to have to look back to the monitor something like the tormach it's right here not a big deal but just something to keep in mind the thing that i really really do like about this is the center wheel here is specific steps so i'll typically use the outer wheel to kind of get close to the dimension let go and then now i can switch into the step mode which is set right now to one thousandth of an inch and i can just kind of sneak up on it and boom there i am so this is a really nice control surface and relatively inexpensive and i think this is a perfect pairing for something like the tormach and last but not least we've got the pendant option i think the pendant kind of covers most of the bases it does all the things it does most of the things right the only downside i have with the pendant is the wire which you can get wired wireless versions of these but i've heard they're just not nearly as good as the wired version and the coarse movement so in you know previous example if i've got the machine over there and i want to move it to this it's just a couple more steps with the pendant we can't move two axes at the same time we've got to select the x-axis we got to select the movement type i'll get into that later move it that way now select the y-axis and come back so it's just a couple more steps and there's a lot of options on how to move the machine that we have to then make sure we select so it takes a little bit more time to kind of get used to and kind of get comfortable with but let's zoom in and i'll show you the screen and i'll show you some of these options and just kind of get you an idea of what all you can do with something like this so i'm not going to go into every single little feature of this but i'll kind of give you an overview of what it can do the first thing that we know this is we've got an e-stop on one side and then we have this enable button on the other side and if we hit the e-stop it will e-stop the machine which is pretty cool and we pulled out and it resets that ties directly into mach 3 and mach 4 which is a really handy feature i always have the pendant in my hand when i'm running a program talking about running programs if we hit start you can see it has cycle start and if i hit this enable button at the same time it will start our program the same with stop and spindle if i hit spindle that will start it which is kind of nice so we have full control over our programs the spindle and other things if we look over here at the side you can see i've got x y and z and we have the full readout which is the same readout that we have on the monitor so i can sit there and move the axis and that is the readout for that axis we have a lot of different movement modes here so if we do that that's s that's step mode and you can see it's going to be moving at a hundred percent speed at .01 so if i do one click that is 0.01 inch and i can hold the enable button and then change the step size so i can go down to one inch and i i was going to try and show the machine moving but it's going to be really difficult so you're just going to have to kind of listen for it but this is moving at one step or one inch step intervals and of course i can go down to a thousandth so you have very fine control this has a nice click to it you can easily easily move one click at a time so this is really great for eyeballing a zero location or like centering a hole things like that you can move it nice and precise and then we can very simply go x y and z and just control each other axis the same way the v mode is velocity mode depending on the velocity at which i turn this pendant you can see by the numbers i'm moving it very slowly and now if i move it quickly i can move it very fast that's kind of nice we also have constant rates which is kind of an interesting one that's set to 35 percent and no matter how fast i move this as long as it's moving it will move at 35 percent so i'll just kind of let me get it to the side there we go so i'll move it this way you can hear fast slow doesn't matter it's just moving at a constant rate i can use this button to do the constant rate so i go let's just say down to 16 percent and now moving this at any speed moves at a constant 16 so you can kind of see some of the things that you can do with this we can also go down here to feed rate override this is just your simple um feed rate override that will change the feed rate so i can run the program slower i can run the program quicker and then i also have my spindle rate override and what's really cool is as i'm changing this on the pendant it's changing it real time on the screen this is directly tied into mock they're not like stepping on each other's toes this number is real time updating on the screen as well so you can change the feed rate change the spindle rate all sorts of stuff we can even zero out all the axes this has a lot of features and it's basically a handheld control for the entirety of mach 3 and mach 4. so if you've been paying attention to this video you probably realize that this is kind of my ultimate solution might not be right for some people but for most people i think this is going to be kind of the best solution the downsides this is about 250 so it is by far the most expensive thing i have talked about in this video there are a couple alternatives that are much cheaper but they just don't really seem to have the same feature set or the functionality that the vista cnc pendant does have they do have other models which are cheaper and you lose some of the features but getting this exact thing you're going to spend about 250 so something to consider the other thing to think about with vista cnc is their company kind of sucks they have very little technical support just try emailing or calling them they might not respond you might order a product and get the wrong thing they're just really not that great of a company additionally you've got mach 3 and mach 4. their mach 3 driver is pretty decent it works it does all the things that you would expect it to do the mach 4 driver on the other hand just minimum viable deliverables they it only does what i showed there's other functions that i can have on this pendant they don't work in mach4 you can set custom functions you have the x the y and the z which also go to the a the b and the c axis which i don't have on this machine you can't disable them because the plug-in configuration doesn't even load in i've emailed them about a couple times they won't respond and other people have had the same issue you just can't configure the plug-in for mach 4. it will work out of the box once you upgrade the firmware and do some other things but once you get it working you can't configure it any further it says that it does all these things but it doesn't so their driver support is terrible their customer support is terrible the hardware is good everything else not so much so something to keep in mind if you're looking at the vista cnc pendant i'm obviously not sponsored by them i am not promoting them in this video i would say go try and find another option if you can unfortunately there really aren't any other options on the market so begrudgingly i recommend the vista cnc pendant so i think that's about all i have for this video if there was one takeaway i think it would be to not underestimate the importance of sending a pulse command to your controller and by pulse command i mean having the manual pulse generator having a wheel that you can send an individual discrete pulse something like the keyboard wherever it is it's over there you press that button and it's going to just send some amount of however long that button press is and there's nothing you can really do about it you're not going to be able to tap that button reliably and get one thousandth of an inch move or ten thou of a move you really need to send it a pulse command the shuttle express does that this does that a true pendant is going to be able to give you that pulse command and then you can choose how much movement that pulse equals whether it be 0.1.01.001 or whatever it is that is really critical in getting exactly to where you're going i set my z height a lot of the time by having a one two three block and making it so it hits and then just slowly moving it up right until the z the one two three block can slide underneath and then i know that is my zero height you just can't do that with a keyboard you can't do that with the touchscreen and you certainly can't do it with the gamepad so having that manual pulse generation whether it be a true mpg or something like the shuttle express i think is very critical so i like those but at the same time i also use the keyboard a lot just to kind of slide the machine around so something to keep in mind the vista cnc not a great company but the product is pretty decent so that is kind of going to be my go-to that and a keyboard i think those two are a great combination for me so hopefully you got something out of this video thanks for watching check out my facebook page for any updates to my channel and see you in the next video bye

Channel: Robert Cowan

Views: 7,271

Keywords: avid cnc, cnc router, cncrouterparts, cnc pendant, vistacnc, mach3, mach4, touchscreen cnc, wireless keyboard cnc, cnc, diy cnc

Id: Elkc7YSBbk8

Length: 20min 45sec (1245 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 11 2021