Raspberry Pi 4 with X-Controller

X-Carve Troubleshooting
1

Alrighty. Purchased an X-Carve 750mm nearly a year ago. Original was using Easel on a Mac but got sick of bringing my expensive laptop into my work shop, lots of dust, I’m sure most of you can understand.

Decided to use a Raspberry Pi4 instead and I have a nice little setup going, except for the fact that i cant use it…

For some reason the X-Controller doesnt even recognize that its plugged into my Pi. Yes…I have been trying to figure this out for literally months without luck. I have tried everything in this forum that I can find and I’m getting really frustrated at this point.

I have tried all of the samyk driver stuff and none of that works for me.

Does anyone know of a way to get this to work?

Thanks.

2

I wanted to try a Pi with UGS, it worked, but in the end, I went back to my 200 windows 10 laptop.

I followed this video to set things up.

Homemade CNC Router Part 8: Installing UGS On A Raspberry PI (Arduino CNC Router) - YouTube

3

I did give UGS a try, but I found that it was buggy at best, and I need the visualizer to work, which is one of the things I like about Easel.

At this point I need to be able to use Easel, my issue is that I cannot get my X-Controller to even recognize that it is plugged into the Pi.

Again, I am using a Raspberry Pi4 with the 64-bit OS. Have also tried on the 32-bit which is a no go.

Samyk has a whole guide on installing a driver and making it work, but for some reason when I follow those steps, it does not work.

4

I know you want to use Easel, but give gSender a try…I think you’ll like it.

5

I actually don’t want to use Easel, as I don’t like the subscription, but I don’t know what else to use.

Just tried gSender, as it looked like a good option, but…5 hours into this, and I am unable to get it working on the Pi.

I installed Buster on my Pi, but the board that comes with Pi 4 is incompatible with Buster. So I am back to square one.

In an ideal world, I need a CNC software (preferably open source) that will run on 32 or 64 bit Bookworm on a Raspberry Pi 4.

Or alternately, if anyone can help me get Easel working on the Pi, that is fine too.

6

There are some CNC hats for the PI. Ryan Ballard runs a home built CNC with a PI. He has a few videos about it.

7

@Mosey
I just tried on a fresh install on a Pi4.

  1. Downloaded PiOS 32bit image here

  2. Used etcher to flash TF card.

  3. Go through Pi setup and run all updates.

  4. Download gSender_1.2.2_armv7l.deb from here.

  5. Install Package.

Note: I just did this and haven’t tried to connect to a machine on this install.

8

Hey Mosey, You might try openbuilds.com. Their software called Openbuilds Control is a free software and includes cad and cam functions . Somewhat very similar to Easel with the look of a Vcarve light. What do you have to loose at this point.

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9

I have a 750 also. The X Controller is nothing more than a USB serial port emulator as far as the Pi is concerned. If you plug it into the pi it should show under /dev as ttyUSBxx where xx are numbers if I remember correctly. There is no need to install any drivers because the serial emulator driver is already included in the kernel as a HID. If you don’t see this device then the connection is faulty or there is an issue at the hardware level or you may need to set permissions (called udev rules) that allow USB drivers to be accessible by the users on the operating system.

Finally, try a browser based gcode sender. You won’t have to install extra software. For example: Kiri:Moto

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