Touchscreen Controller using UGS

[ibohan]

I decided I didn't like having my laptop sitting out in my garage getting covered in saw dust.  So I managed to put together a 7" touchscreen controller using a Raspberry Pi and the latest stable version of UGS Platform.







I added some cheap craft magnets to the bottom so it'll stick to my toolbox a little bit. They don't do much, just enough to not tip over when I tap the screen.



I used a Raspberry Pi 3 B+, the official 7" display, and a generic case I found on Amazon.
Configuring everything took a couple hours of trouble shooting, but I managed to get it to a pretty good state. The only thing I haven't looked into yet is getting the UGS visualizer to work. Its not a big deal for me, so I'll probably never get around to it. Configuring UGS otherwise was pretty painless. The touchscreen functionality took a while.

I also got a wireless keyboard to manually enter commands, but so far I haven't needed to use it.  UGS Platform works pretty well with just the touchscreen.

It's nice having the portability.  I can hold it while I lean over and jog the machine to zero and I don't have to worry about anything getting sucked into fans or falling into cracks.  I keep the keyboard in the drawer when I'm not using it.

If anyone is interested in doing this, I can put together an Amazon list and copy the Raspberry Pi ISO so you can run it with all my settings.

Here is a link to the Imgur album if the pictures don't show up.

[kevin]

Great job, that is pretty awesome!.

[aquanub]

super cool. thank for sharing!

[Derek the Admin]

Looks cool. About how much would you say you have into it?

[freik]

Yeah, I'm also really curious about the price. My ancient laptop's keyboard is collecting lots of obnoxious wood chips. When that keyboard dies, I need to go with something that I can just use an external keyboard with if necessary (and, when not necessary, lives in a bag somewhere in the shop). I was thinking one of these, though I occasionally pop up Fusion360 on my CNC controller to fix a minor issue. I wonder how slow Fusion360's CAM tool path calculations would run on an Atom CPU

-Kev

[ibohan]

All together I spent $140 not including the keyboard and the 98 cents worth of magnets.

Here's the Amazon list of what I bought:
a.co/1IupNVk

I had some bad experiences with the touchscreen seller, but that was the cheapest option I found. You could probably also make your own case pretty easily and save $15.

[tim]

Aug 29, 2018 16:04:34 GMT ibohan said:

All together I spent $140 not including the keyboard and the 98 cents worth of magnets.

Here's the Amazon list of what I bought:
a.co/1IupNVk

I had some bad experiences with the touchscreen seller, but that was the cheapest option I found. You could probably also make your own case pretty easily and save $15.

if you can wait, save 40$ and order on aliexpress.

[jchamberland27]

Looks great! I've been thinking of doing something similar built into the side of an enclosure, but I really like the clean look of the freestanding screen.

If you ever run into trouble with UGS on the touchscreen, or if people are looking for an alternative option to save their keyboards from dust, I would recommend giving cncjs running on a raspberry pi a shot. The interface is very touchscreen friendly, and since it runs a web server on the pi you can control it from anything on your home Wi-Fi with a web browser. I'll often use my desktop on the other side of the house to upload my gcode to the pi, then go out to the garage to jog the machine into place and start the job with my phone.

It also has a variety of widgets for things like laser control and webcam monitoring that seem like they would be useful, although I haven't really played around with those yet so I can't vouch for them.

[VGCustomShop]

cool man!

[Bruce]

In the past I've bought the 7" Kindle fire and root it to regular Google Android with success. For $50 it's an alternative touch screen. And the quality is good.
You could keep the crappy Kindle GUI and just use VNC app to remote into the RPi.
...just brainstorming ideas.