I’m looking for some advice on how I might set up a Cartesian style robot to simply go to preset coordinates when a button or keyboard key is hit. I’d like to set it up so that I can have a dozen points in the X and Y axis and can get a probe to jump to each one when that particular button is pressed. Lastly A button to zero the machine on startup.

Any suggestions as to what I could use as a controller? I would use steppers for motion and perhaps a PC to control the step/Dir signals. Any suggestions to a simple software solution that could do this?

I've built a couple of CNC machines and most of run from Mach 2 on a PC. I just don't have any experience with software other then this.

Thanks, Lawrence

You might want to ask in the Mach2 section here, or in the Yahoo groups, but would it be possible to build a pendant, with maybe an I-pac from http://www.ultimarc.com, and use keygrabber and set up macros to do what you want in Mach2?

Isn't there a way to do this with a controller of some sort? Am I going to need a PC just to get this kind of thing to work?