I just wanted to relay an issue where the pendant randomly drops out and becomes non functional. I'm aware that there are posts on this in the Mach forums.

This pendant has been super reliable when using Mach3. A plugin exists for Mach4 but the combination has issues.
this model has axis lights and you know it checked out when the lights are off. restart Mach4 and it comes back but that's not a good thing in the middle of a job.
at one point I was turning the dial to move the axis and it checked out and the machine kept going. stop didn't stop. Estop on the pendant did the trick.
My setup has something called an EE box that is directly wired to the G540. So motors have to stop and Mach4 doesn't even know the E stop has been tripped.

in fact the E stop signal is always on from the pendant. you can't turn it off. so I'm not reading that signal into Mach4 or it wouldn't run. As far as I can tell without this EE box the pendant would be useless.


so this is the progression of events:

had Mach3 to USB Smoothstepper to G540 with a PA3 pendant for many years.

Mach3 no longer works on Win10 so moved to Mach4

USB Smoothstepper doesn't have a Mach4 plugin so move to UC100.

UC100 seems to work but now the pendant has issues with Mach4.

I'm just hoping that someone comes up with a solution because I'm tired of trying to working around software issues, and don't feel like taking the chance that the the next Mach4 compatible hardware isn't really compatible.

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