Hi Everyone,
I thought I would send this out for general replies, as it might be of interest to share information/experiences in this regard. I recently upgraded to Path Pilot and at the same time took the opportunity to change over my lathe and router from Mach3 to standard LinuxCNC. I must say that I really like them both so I will stick with them.

Some time ago I made a control box with joystick, keypad, MPG, etc. that I used for Mach3, and I wanted to get this working in LinuxCNC as well. I hit the books and learned the HAL programming, and now have it working in conjunction with the MESA 5i25 and 7i76 cards.(NOTE: The 5i25/6i25 are the cards distributed by Tormach. The 7i76 is a general IO and encoder card).

So the next step was to get it working in Path Pilot. I have made some progress but also hit a few bumps in the road.I was wondering whether anyone else has looked into modifying the HAL and INI files to extend Path Pilot to external controls. I disabled the automatic MESA flash in the login script, and have PP running with the 6i25/7i76 combination. With some straightforward modifications to the hal files, I have some of the external controls working (joystick, MPG, a few buttons).However, it appears that Tormach does not distribute all of the standard HAL components with the Path Pilot distribution (e.g., kbmatrix). Has anyone compiled the additional components?

More generally, would anyone like to share their experiences "tweaking" path pilot.

Finally, I'd like to complement Tormach on their apparent willingness to allow such modifications. It is relatively easy to get at the linux prompt and configuration files, which are all very well commented. I realize that this will put me out of support, but it is great to have the ability to experiment and extend functionality to keep using all the accessories that we have built up over the years.