Personally, I'm mostly happy with Chilipeppr. However, I have refurbed an old Routermaster II for a friend and Chilipeppr might not fit his work-flow. He's a nearly retired woodworker and would prefer to keep things simple. So I'm looking at other options.
Tgfx, obviously. And it looks like Universal-gcode-sender will eventually get support. The TinyG CNC Console for Android also looks interesting. One could just use a serial program, but that is the opposite of simple. Anything else that I've missed?
Tgfx looks like the best bet for now. But opinions are welcome.
Ya. I hear you on tgFX being abandoned. My hope is that it will work well enough for the time-being or that I can dial in Chilipeppr.
Certainly, Chilipeppr is nice for a one-man CNC shop with a self-built machine hooked up to a decent PC. For a designer with a CNC router for rapid prototyping, it's also really interesting. But requiring a PC with web access right next to a CNC machine is really painful in a production environment. It requires a degree of computer competance of the operator that isn't as common as one would think. (Think about viruses, security updates, and a bored operator with access to the web.) A usable pendant or Android interface would go a long way to making this problem disappear.
A dead simple interface, that would run on really low-end hardware (ie. RPi), with decent control of jogging and a big STOP button, is really all that is necessary.
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