A Little History

On June 22, 2010 at the Digital Machinist Workshop in Ann Arbor, Mi., we announced the newest products of our CNC pendant line. Based on our popular USB CNC Mini-Pendant 2 (MP2), the Mini-Pendant 2 Control Processor (MP2CP) is the heart of the pendant product we have been selling since December 2008.

Back in early 2008, one of our early design goals was to produce a CNC pendant for $99. After much development and "feature adding", our "$99" pendant would become a $275 pendant. Much of this cost was from a few expensive components such as the anodized extruded aluminum enclosure, the custom engraved panel, the high-quality pushbuttons and selector switch knob. The assembly was also labor intensive and our cost for these parts and labor far exceeded the $99 goal we had strived for early in our design goals. We opted to produce a very high quality pendant that cost much more to manufacture than we expected and many of our clients saw the value in this product and we sold many of these (along with our Z-Axis Touch-Off - ZTO) in the last 18 months. We truly believe (and have proven) that the higher cost is soon forgotten if you produce a high quality turnkey product that performs well for the client who can justify purchasing one.

However, we still believed that there had to be a way we could provide a "full featured" pendant function (equivalent to, or better than, our MP2) for $99...or less. After a lot of thought and talking to users and potential customers the answer became clear. Our customers (and potential customers) were the key to our producing a low cost, feature-rich pendant!

You see, our target audience (sales speak) was not a wide range of the general public, but a very narrow segment of highly skilled, creative artisans and craftsmen who by owning and operating CNC equipment possessed the skills and motivation to produce their own customized pendant given the proper hardware base and guidance. Many potential clients were not electrical and/or software engineers who could design their own printed circuits or write their own firmware...BUT, they WERE skilled in the fabrication and creation of CNC generated products. Even the "newbies" show a motivation to design, create and learn.

With this simple "epiphany", and TMC providing the proper electronic and firmware "heart" of the pendant function, there was now a way to produce a fully featured pendant for $99........actually as low as $69.95. With a few parts and some labor supplied by the user, and with some guidance from examples of different pendant configurations, we believe we have provided a base platform that a creative user can build a customized pendant for his specific needs, far surpassing even the MP2.

This led us to write the first of a 3 part article for the Digital Machinist magazine. The first article explains how our MP2 works and how we came to see the need to manufacture it. We then introduce the MP2CP Do-It-Yourself (DIY) kit and show a few examples of different pendant creations to help meet the budget of the DIY user. If you haven't yet acquired a copy of the Summer 2010 Digital Machinist magazine (I recommend subscribing), you can click here and read an early draft of the article complete with links to the photos and tables.

Note: Our kits are based on the assumption that the customer is skilled in simple soldering techniques (and tools) such are needed to strip wires and solder them to switches and possibly to solder LEDs to a printed circuit board. These are the only soldering skills required. All other skills needed are simple shop skills such as drilling enclosures and mounting hardware. Even text panel creation can be as simple as printing, laminating, and using an X-acto knife to cut out the front panel.
If you don't possess these skills or don't have someone with these skills who can help you, please consider purchasing a "turnkey" CNC pendant such as our MP2 instead of the MP2CP kit. Click here to enter our MP2 and ZTO main site.

Our MP2CP DIY kit is based on the functions of our MP2 pendant. The current version is only programmed for the Mach3 controller application environment under Windows. Later versions will be totally programmable by the user and will be available later this summer (and the focus of Part II of our article series in the Digital Machinist magazine.) The future "programmable" features can be retrofitted to the MP2CP products currently available (by installing a new user microchip). Detailed operation of the MP2CP functions are the same as the MP2 and are discussed in detail in the current MP2 User Guide. (click here).

To purchase any of our Kits, Combos, or Options, click Here.
All Documentation (UGs, DM Article - Part 1, & videos) for both the MP2 and MP2CP  Here (8/28)
New Enclosure Example page provides examples in many CAD formats created Here. (8/27)