I’ve been using this one for quite some time and still love it, though it’s not for sale anymore:
It’s just a pi pico acting as an HID keyboard. There’s an oled screen, two decent buttons, and a truly excellent rotary encoder (I sourced the encoder and confirmed it makes up the large majority of material costs )
Given that it could all be written in circuit python, I’m betting it would only take a day start to finish. Hell, it’s simple enough even some AI could probably do a decent job of writing the firmware
Maybe I’l throw a wireless pico in it and make it wireless
If it isn’t working, one option is to use a utility to reprogram the controller so that it outputs keypresses, mapping those to Carbide Motion’s shortcuts.
I can’t say for sure since I modified the code on mine awhile ago. I switch between windows and macOS so I think I did some shenanigans with shortcuts to account for that.
Will is already on the right track though, this is just emulating a keyboard.
open up the accessibility/onscreen keyboard on your computer and cycle through the functions on the pendant. The onscreen keyboard will blink each “button” as it is pressed. The speed button on the pendent should light up 123. When in X, you should see . Y should be . and Z should be page up/page down.
If the onscreen keyboard does not show any keypress, it may be an issue with the pendent itself
(the nice thing about testing with the accessibility keyboard is that it sees all the keypresses regardless of which program has focus. Convenient for testing things that would normally see the keystroke swallowed by some program…looking you you RDP )
So far this is the best option I have found. I have purchased the one off of etsy and it worked well for a while. My shop isn’t air conditioned and the keypad kept coming off then the buttons would work intermittingly. The seller replaced the first one no questioned asked, after the second started doing the same thing I decided to try other options. The Rii Mini Keypad seems to be working very well with my Surface Tablet.
I use a MacBook and I just bought a Macally keypad like Kevin used in one of his videos. Has anyone set one of those up to use with Carbide Create? I think the left/Right buttons control the X- axis and the Up/Down arrows control the Y-axis but, I am not sure how to control the Z-Axis.
Another related question. I love the 9 preset points to quickly move the spindle around the table. Can you set those up on the same controller? Has anyone done that as well? I’m just not familiar enough (yet) with setting up a controller.
If I understand what you are asking, no, there isn’t any sort of shortcut option which allows accessing the Rapid Position movement commands directly using a game controller — the closest one could get to this would be a touch screen.
As someone prone to 'yak shaving ', I can think of a way to access the rapid position movement commands with a game controller that might work.
If you are on Windows, there is an absolutely amazing utility called Autohotkey. It allows you to automate just about anything you can do with a computer using a keyboard or mouse.
Basically, you can map complex or repetitive tasks to simple interactions like a keypress. I literally use Autohotkey scripts everyday to make my life easier.
Diving deep, it has the ability to click buttons for you, even if they are not traditional UI buttons, by recognizing regions of the screen taking into account the active window rectangle.
So, in theory, this could work. Now I have to fight the urge to spend the weekend on this.
Or, you could convince the Carbide Motion engineers to assign keyboard shortcuts for the rapid movements.
p.s. I believe on Mac there is a similar utility called Hammerspoon but I’ve never used it.
I wanted to use my Xbox One controller for this very thing, but cant get the controller to work in Motion. I have the controller connected to my computer, but that is as far as I can go with it. The last video I had watched about assigning key functions, there was a website to go to and download an app to help assign the buttons, but it was a very questionable site and I don’t want my information stolen again, (identity theft of my information twice).
Identity theft isn’t fun to deal with when you are the one that they stole from. So, I have a hard time trusting questionable websites, but I still can’t figure out a good program to help assign the buttons for my movements. Have talked about this before with pendant options, but I don’t want to keep purchasing more things for the machine when I have seen someone had used an Xbox One controller for their machine. I have one available for my machine to use, would like to just program that into my machine/computer.
Not sure which utility or scammy website you checked out, but if you are on Windows then there is AntiMicro and AntiMicroX which you can download from GitHub, which is relatively safe.
I second the Rii. Its cheaper than a lot of the suggestions, wireless, and has a great battery life. Its also not a one trick pony, its very convenient for controlling a computer in general.
Thanks for the original input on this. Purchased today on Amazon and looking forward to getting it!
I do have the dream of creating a “mini arcade” deck with just the buttons for jog. I saw one in the community and can’t seem to find it again . Some day… some day!
)
. Y should be 
. and Z should be page up/page down.
.
. Some day… some day!