CNCJS Thoughts?

that would limit what commands I could type in UGS. I don’t see an M key or an S key so I would not be able to vary the intensity of the laser to align or focus. If all you wanted to do was jog the machine then this would work fine but it is the same price as the full keyboards that are no bigger. And with the Raspberry Pi you need some type of keyboard anyway might as well use the same one all the time.

Hey @AustinSt.Aubin,
Thanks for the information! How do you get your light to dim down? I have a similar camera but never could find a way to get it to dim.

@PatrickLesher The light push button on the usb connection of the borescape camera I have allows me to toggle though different light values. It remembers the setting durring power cycles.
DANIU A99 720P 2MP 6LED 8.0mm Lens Waterproof Android/PC Endoscope Inspection Borescope Tube Camera

I’m new here and just finished building an OpenBuilds MiniMill. I started out using GRBL panel from a Windows PC and had no problems. I then tried CNCjs from the same Windows PC and had no problems. My end goal was to migrate to a Raspberry Pi using CNCjs, but I have had no luck with getting it to startup after typing the command “cnc” at the command line prompt. I get no errors, but it just sits there doing nothing. I followed the github Raspberry Pi Setup Guide explicitly. Does anyone have a clue what could be causing the freeze up after typing “cnc” to start it?

P.S. I’m not a programmer, so I have to trust the Raspberry Pi Setup Guide is providing the correct commands and I do recognize the # in front of some lines meant they were comments.

Thanks,
Michael Dwyer

Make sure you are using the latest software from raspberry pi.

I had some issues with the serial port library dependency you need to install. There are several pathways in the wiki. I had to install the serial port library. Let me try to gather more information and post back to you.

Everything I used was supposed to be the latest, but I appreciate anything you can do to help me.

By some strange luck, I think I figured it out. Although I installed everything from a CLI, I switched to the GUI, typed http://:8888/ in chromium and was able to start CNCjs and make a connection to my controller board. I shut it down and returned to the CLI to stop PM2 and reset it to start on port 8888 (port 8000 was not working for me). I also reset the iptables to redirect port 80 to port 8888. I rebooted my pi and went directly to chromium and typed http://:8888/ again. I was able to start CNCjs and open a connection to my controller without any problems.

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This is great news… I am extraemos happy with cncjs… to me it is better than chillipepr… except that it does not yet have auto level for PCBs

Just saw the struggles some people in this thread are having installing cncjs, mainly due to the serialport package. Well, I’ve got a Docker image for cncjs that is Raspberry-pi compatible, so if you install Docker you can just use my image without having to compile cncjs.

There’s a number of guides out there for installing Docker on Raspberry Pi, but it should be just four lines in your terminal:

curl -sSL https://get.docker.com | sh
sudo usermod -aG docker pi
sudo systemctl enable docker
sudo systemctl start docker

Once you’ve done that, you can launch my rpi-cncjs image with just this:

docker run -p 80:8000 --restart=always -d --privileged --name cncjs rohan/rpi-cncjs

You will then have a Docker container named “cncjs” that starts itself whenever your Raspberry Pi boots up. It will be listening on port 80.

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How do you update the docker image with new cncjs?

I update and push it when there’s a new version. Alternatively you can use the source Dockerfile from the image page to build your own image whenever you’d like.

Great! So much to learn!

Dude, thanks for this. Saved me a lot of time and frustration. Much appreciated.

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Wow

I just got this working and it’s so much better than what I was doing before I’m just blown away.

I have a headless Raspberry pi plugged into the X-controller, and can draw parts in Fusion360, and use the easel post processer, then run the G-code from cncjs.

The workflow is now almost as easy as using my 3D printer from fusion. You do have to pay attention to the CAM settings in Fusion, but that’s fairly simple after watching a couple of the zillions of YouTube videos on the subject.

When I get into the mode (and have the time) to start making stuff, I hate having my laptop tied up on the 3D printer or the X-carve, which prevents me from drawing stuff in Fusion until the part is done. Between this and Octoprint I can now multitask :smiley:

Anyone with this working care to copy their SD card image and send me a Dropbox or OneDrive link? I spent the better part of a weekend (3 rebuilds ) trying to get it to work and it would either never connect or the 1 time it did i would send a test gcode file (I did home it) and it sent the spindle out to parts unknown, then never connected again afterwards…

Darryl, I don’t know if this could be your problem, but I had similar difficulty at first with both Octoprint (on my 3D printer) and CNCJS.

I had given up on octoprint, then when I had the same issues with cncjs I tried a different micro SD card.

Everything worked like it was supposed to after changing the cards out.