Robot Position Record and Playback

I have many questions.  ANy feedback would be appricated.

1) I see Linux CNC mills equipped with jog wheel pendents or and similar interfaces. Is there a relatively simple game-pad interface to move a machine, in my case it will be a 5-DOF 3D printed robot.

2) Then, I understand there is a way to record positions for future playback. Is there an implementation I could reference?  Any links?  If I can get that far I could write interpreter code to translate between G-code and a pseudo robot language/syntax.

3) Currently I have the Axis GUI running with VisMach in sim mode.  Is there a better UI interface to use for a project like this?

4) Has any of this been done before that I can reference? My Google-fu is letting me down.

forum.linuxcnc.org/21-axis/30986-axis-po...ger?start=100#296115

probably this

I did stumble across that utility. It only seems to only record XYZ. I'll need the abc also. And the Teach-In function doesn't seem to include abc.

"line format: line-no X Y Z flood mist lube spindle"

I'll have to look more closely at the logger, maybe it is pulling position data with some other method.

Well I found my own answer on the gamepad.

joypad with halui and hal_input

Actually looks not too difficult.

I did stumble across that utility. It only seems to only record XYZ. I'll need the abc also. And the Teach-In function doesn't seem to include abc.

The logger creates the axes checkboxes dynamically according to what axes have been configured. So if you have xyzabc axes configured it will give you the option to record them.