I have a couple of small steppers -- 20 oz in or thereabouts -- that I think would serve dandy as force feedback motors in a custom jog shuttle controller. I want the shuttle wheel to resist turning proportionally to the mill's stepper current draw (or torque, or whatever meaningful measure there is of how hard they're working). It doesn't have to be very precise, but precise is good also.
How do you control a stepper in this fashion? Operation will mostly be in quadrant 2, plus return to center when it's let go. I think I would like it to be switchable between operating in velocity mode -- turn more to go faster -- and position mode, emulating a hand wheel or crank.
Any thoughts on how to do this? Or which of the many boards or newsgroups might discuss something like this? I realize I might have to program a PIC to do this on the cheap, but off the shelf would be nice too.