Awesome. Good to hear someone is making progress.

I have made the decision to go with a standing pedestal with simple button controls rather than a joystick or dial. The only thing I wish I knew how to do would be to have DROs on the pedestal for Machine status and operator actions. But that will come in due time.

With the intent to replace a bunch of switches, buttons, a rotary knob and a 4 line LCD on one of my products, I bought a touch screen well over a year ago. By the time I started into that project, the MACH4 demo was out and the speed and power of the GUI was a game changer. I decided to nix the touch screen and use the real estate to add pendant functionality to the device.

Have you considered using a video splitter (or dual output video card) and having a small (and hardened) monitor on your pedestal? It would then be a (relatively) simple matter to add screens to MACH4 GUI that would be appropriate for the 'slave' monitor with big DROS and whatever other goodies you wanted to monitor.