MAMEing a CNC router

[wraggster]

http://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/mame.jpg (http://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/mame.jpg)[Ed] is pretty old school. He loves the functionality of old industrial shop tools that have their own dedicated systems. With huge candy-like buttons, who wouldn’t? [Ed] decided to replicate this aesthetic by building a MAME controller for his Mach3 controlled (http://www.edsjunk.net/Blog/EdsJunk/Blog/Entries/2011/12/21_Dedicated_Mach3_Control_Panel.html) router.[Ed] had a bunch of MAME buttons and joysticks sitting around from a forgotten project. With his vinyl plotter, it was relatively easy to make a very nice looking control panel. To connect the buttons to the Mach3 computer, a disused I-Pac (http://www.ultimarc.com/ipac1.html) was brought into the mix. The I-Pac reads the state of the buttons and sends keyboard codes over USB to the computer.Because the very popular Mach3 CNC software (http://www.machsupport.com/) responds to hotkeys, it was very simple to make the buttons do as they say. [Ed] has full control over the X, Y, and Z axes as well as the spindle speed. It seems like this would be interesting to do some ‘free form’ CNC work on [Ed]‘s router.

http://hackaday.com/2011/12/22/mameing-a-cnc-router/