I guess it's a catch 22. I can't see manufacturers of pendants losing money writing interfaces for something is still in beta either. I would have thought the user interface would be quite a ways along and well defined such that pendants (most of which just emulate keystrokes) would be able to move ahead. Perhaps not. The Shuttle Pro interface was never written by the manufacturer anyway.
 I know Ron was quite excited about how easy it was for Brian to add some screen controls to do some thing or other on a demo version of Mach4 at NAMES. I wasn't too impressed because I have no use for operating it with a mouse and the screen (for the most part) because my screen and mouse are not near the machine.
 Perhaps it's a sign of the overall feeling about Mach4 that people are not jumping in to make it useable. If I had any knowledge at all about how to program a pendant interface I'd be all over it.

Oh well. Back to sleep for a few more months I guess.  

Sage

vistacnc are doing a plug for there pendants

So it is possible.
 I guess gone are the days of the users jumping in to make the product better. We'll have to leave it to the entrepreneurs I guess and just pay the bucks.

Sage

you can do it your self it just depends on what type the pendant is modbus, keysniffer, other.

what brian did with the mouse was just one way to do it

Shuttle Pro is what we're talking about.
Easy for you I guess. I can do lots of things but writing device interfaces for Windows programs is not one of them.
 I assume what Brian did was trivial (for him) because he already had access to drivers for a mouse and he knows how the screen interface works because he wrote it. Making a connection to a device that Mach4 knows nothing about (yet), getting Mach4 to find and recognize the device much less talk to it is a whole other problem.
It is my understanding that you can't just load the factory ShuttlePro Windows driver and make it emulate keystrokes and Mach4 will be happy.
At least that's not how it worked for Mach3. Mach3 had a specific driver for ShuttlePro.
But then, like I say, I know very little about how it works.

Sage

it would not be easy for me it took me a week to get tool height probing working,

(;-) Most users that USED to jump in and  do that DON'T know anymore about Mach4 than you do. Very little is actually published . The sample code are still extremely complicated compared to mach3.

Only TIME will tell the real story, (;-) TP

You can count on one hand the number of users that wrote Mach3 plugins for the community, and none of those happened overnight.

lua`s hard work there`s to many ways things can be done, to get the tool height probing working I had to add to the code, I don't know if what I did was wright or wrong or the way it was meant to be done by the person who wrote the manual, but it seems to work

Nobody is talking about Lua. The discussion is about writing a plugin, which is probably 10x harder than Lua.