I've been laying the groundwork for building a really nice pendant for my CNC mill. My intention is to end up with a semi-intelligent pendant that is visually appealing as well as quick and easy to use.

I started out tinkering with hidcomp (http://hidcomp.sourceforge.net/) and an off-the-shelf gamepad controller to see how well it worked. I was impressed enough with what I found that I started to move towards a custom USB device, and got some very basic functionality working to jog my mill around quite easily.

I then stepped it up to the next level and added a small color LCD, and tied it into hidcomp's nice, flexible LCD output architecture. I am considering using several of these displays in my pendant since they are inexpensive.

I've got some more informative text as well as a couple of quick YouTube videos on my blog: http://www.tangentaudio.com/?p=294