hey guys,.  i am making a custom consol and am using an ipac keyboard encoder.

first it took me ages to work out the ipac software they send with the unit was not compatable with the board.

now i have issues with hot keys.

i want to use my own hotkeys and have downloaded screens4 and machscreen,  both programs are the worst things i have ever used.

i have been at it for near on 4 hours and i just cant get a screen to take.  they alway stuff up in one way or another.  you click somewere and new buttons pop up that you don't want.  the background moves around all the time.

i would not be lying if i said i have opened and closed a mach3 screen 100 times and have got no further that changing 3 or 4 hot keys.


then when i use mach3screen it keeps telling me about duplicate hotkeys so that is giving me grief as well.  i have been trying to use odd keys like alt= and the lik but still get the error.

ithe more i play around with all this the more i wish i never started a cnc conversion.  should have just brought something comercially available. the amount of hours of my life i have lost trying to work through stupid crap like this would considerably outweigh the extra cost.  i guess for some it is the journey and others the destination.  for me its the destination, i am hating this journery more and more each day.

rant over.  thanks in advance

It would be much better to use a Pokeys or similar to get the extra I/O.
The iPac is very old technology in Mach terms and I would be surprised if many people use them now. The iPac  is emulating keystrokes and as the standard screenset has keystrokes assigned to certain functions, that is why you hit the issue with possibly duplicating them. With devices such as the PoKeys you are using digital inputs and thus you will not have that problem. You would use Brains to look at the inputs and do whatever you want when its seen.

If determined to use the iPac then I suggest you use KeyGrabber.

Just my thoughts on the matter

Hood

ok, so how does keybragger work?
i opended it earlier but it has no instructions that i can find.

also notice the source key cant be anything like alt-

so would i set it up like this
set all the hotkeys to things like alt- in mach3
set up the ipac to use std letters like a, b,c etc
use the key grabber to tell mach3 that a then equals alt-

if that is right how do i either create the keygrabber file and incorporate it into my screenset.

cant work out how to open a screenset into keygrabber.

Have a read of the Mach2 Customisation manual. Yes I said Mach2, that shows you how old the iPac and Mach use of it is
ftp://machsupport.com/Docs/Mach2_6.11_Custom.pdf

Hood

Yep, can be frustrating for sure when it's all new. Heck I've been doing this for "fun" for years and I'm still lost most of the time. What does help for me is to watch videos as it seems to inject the info right into my simple brain much better than manuals can. It's probably because I don't comprehend very well ( duh).

Have you checked out the videos at all? I know most here prefer Klaus' Mach 3 screen designer, which if you'd like to see the videos, go here http://www.kd-dietz.com/klausphp/index_eng.html# and click projects/mach 3 screen designer/videos and that should help at least a little bit.

I personally have gotten used to screen 4, and all of it's quirks, and have stayed with it for some strange reason, lol! Go here: http://www.machsupport.com/videos/ to click on the last video (screen4) and even though it's old, it's still very helpful.

In any case, just take a moment and calm down a bit and try to have fun with it. If you find you still can't get into it, then yes, maybe it is time to go full turn key as everyone is different, and not everyone enjoys tinkering and getting nowhere, like I do.  

Hope that helps a bit,
Dave

Well I managed to sort of get it sorted. All the buttons I want have a button assigned and work on my console. I now only have 3 button that lost there graphics for reasons unknown. I am not game to try and get them back as it will end up worse knowing how crap that screens program is.
Now my pc will not shut down at all for some reason.
I now have to turn keygrabber on and off if I want to use the keyboard for other things. Still far from great.

Is the is the pokey thing you mentioned ?
http://www.poscope.com/pokeys56u


The mach2 manual link above didn't go anywhere for me.

Thanks. Have just read through it will have another go tomorrow at programming the ipac

ok i have had a go at changing my ipac via keygrabber as per the link posted but all i get is that it can't connect to the keyboard device

any ideas?

just reread the progaming bit but my ipac looks very different to the one in the picture

will have a look for the jumper in question tomorow