For a long time, I have used a single MPG along with a rotary switch for axis selection for my Grizzly SX3. This worked OK, but I eventually got tired of switching between axes; and sometimes I ended up moving the wrong axis when Mach3 missed a switch. So I decided to move to 3 independent MPG's using my existing ZBot for Z, and a pair of Oak/Grigsby encoders for X and Y. I have these electrically connected now using my Smoothstepper and all are working fine.
However, I am now faced with having to lay these out on a control panel in a way that will be easy to grab the dial for the axis needed to adjust. The first idea would be to just lay them out inline horizontally:
X Y Z
or vertically:
X
Y
Z
I am leaning towards separating the Z dial so it is a little easier to find, such as
X
-----Z
Y
or
-----Z
X---------Y
(forgive the dashes - spaces don't work in aligning text in posts)
Before I committed to drilling holes in a panel, I thought I would solicit ideas from this group. I haven't seen any commercial CNC machines, but a lot of photos I have seen have simply had a single MPG. On those that do have more than one MPG, how are they laid out? If you were using 3 MPG's on a regular basis, how would you like to see them arranged?
Thanks for your feedback and ideas.
Dave