Has anyone managed to get a third party grbl controller to work?

Carvey
1

I’m fine with easel so far, but I was hoping to use something more precise.

2

I’m not sure what the controller would have to do with your issue. Most folks who use Easel seem to think it works fine for what they do.

Having said that, I will tell you that I use VCarve and UGS for nearly all of my work. VCarve is an excellent drawing CAD/CAM program and UGS sends commands to my CNC just fine.

3

I’ve tried using Easel, and while impressive, I have been pretty frustrated with it. As for UGS I tried it without success.

4

I use three different ones.
Easel, UGS and GWizardE. Depending on what I am doing. Wizard will not send the Gcode but is a fantastic editor, it shows you just what the tool is going to do and where and it finds errors before they are problems.
This is still a young part of CNCs for hobbyists and relatively speaking the software is still developing.
Code is easy to write (it is for me because I have been writing it for a long time) but can be hard to troubleshoot.
UGS has some good points and some bad, overall I like it because I can MDI easily and make adjustments to the Arduino without a lot of hoops to jump through.
The GWizard has a trial to try and with UGS you might like it.

5

Can you elaborate on what was not successful with UGS?

6

Sure when I connect to the Carvey, I get this in the console output:

**** Connected to COM8 @ 115200 baud ****

gCarvin 1.1.5 [’$’ for help]
GrblFeedbackMessage{message=’[’$H’|’$X’ to unlock]’, distanceMode=‘null’, units=‘null’}

But aything after that, if I try to send a command, it just has a dialog pop up that says:

grbl has not finished booting

7

Hi Bill
Which cnc are you milling on? X-carve? Carve?
Thanks

8

Hey @ClaytonBratt

Have you managed to fix this now?
I also would like a solution outside of Easil to drive Carvey

Ben

9

Estlcam can work with GRBL compatible hardware:

1 Like
10

I have been able to connect directly to the Carvey with Putty and feed it gcode commands directly. I was working on a simple Processing sketch that would take a nc file and feed the file to the machine line by line. But I’m going to look at estlcam from below.

Clay

11

I built a Shapeoko 2 a year ago, which is essentially the same as the XCarve.