I have finally gotten my machine which I call the Ifactory running. I have also take a little paying job to run with my grandson who is nine. The job is to drill 3 thru holes and machine 3 hex pockets in 200 2" diameter polypropylene wheels. I have a chuck mounted to the machine table, and all the work gets done with 1 tool a 1/8" end mill. I already did a sample part and got the customer to approve. Mechanically the machine is very safe. Hard limit switches on all axis that cut off all power and also dumps the DC power supply to the drives. The whole machine has an enclosure with 3/16" clear plexiglas on two sides with door switches that stop the spindle and all motion. There are two hard E-stop switches too. So the job is mount a wheel in the chuck, close the doors, press start, remove the finished part and deburr a little. So this is safe for my grandson, but for the machine not so much. He could easily destroy it!
I find the jogging to be quite dangerous. There are a couple of reasons. My keyboard is very compact, and it is real easy to lean on the arrow keys accidentally. If jog is active, away it goes. In step mode jogging the defaults are 1, 0.1, 0.01. 0.001. IF you are working in metric that is kind of okay. In inches however that 1.0 is a machine killer! It would be really nice if there were two jog step tables, one for inches, one for millimeters. I'd also like to disable jogging from the keyboard altogether. Using Tab to bring up the jog pendant is far safer. Then I'd like to do away with the mode switch between steps and continuous. Needing to press Shift to get into continuous mode is a great safety feature. It takes two hands, your hand can't be between the spindle and the table when it moves except for small steps. So I'd like to remove the mode change buttons from the pendant altogether. I'd also like the buttons for axis motion to be larger and further apart, so a small hand motion while looking at the part not the screen doesn't move you on to a different button. I want my grandson to be able to jog, otherwise you can't teach the important skills of edge and center finding, and the concepts of origins and work offsets. Any suggestions on how to accomplish this?