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I have wanted to control the XCarve over my home network, from my laptop, for some time. I’ve tried a bunch of different setups to try to accomplish this over the last two years, and just “stumbled” upon the easiest one.
This is probably the not supported by inventables, but it does work pretty well in my scenario.
Configure a headless linux machine. This will physically connect to your xcarve controller via USB, here are the requirements:
Enable SSH (openssh works, but any sshd that supports port forwarding will be fine).
Install the xcarve driver for linux on the box (there is an official x86 .deb package available for download).
On the machine you wish to use to control the xcarve, ssh to your machine and forward two ports: 1338, and 1448 – these are the ports that interact with Easel in your browser:
I would like to run the easel driver on a raspberry pi, but it appears that the driver only works on x86, not arm, and therefore you’ll need a more traditional machine to run the xcarve server from.
Has anyone considered using AnyDesk for this. I use it daily to connect remotely to my customers for technical support. When they install the software (free for personal use) on their end I can connect remotely from my pc and do just about anything on their computer that they do. Limitations include changing system configurations and installing some software like Java. However, I can easily control programs like Easel, PicSender, Mach3, UGS and so on. You can also set it up to allow an automatic login from a remote. That must be done on the PC that will be logged into and only on that pc. I use that feature to login to my Home PC from my shop PC. All you need to do is add a web cam and you will be all set.
Start a project, go in the house for lunch and keep an eye on things while having a bite to eat with the ability to stop the carving if need be or start the next tool path as long as it doesn’t require a bit change.
I use virtualhere to control my xcarve via wifi. Took me about 5 minutes to setup and if you remember your pi’s login about 3 minutes i guess. It’s a simple tool to remotely access a USB port on another device, in my case a raspberry pi. Very handy especially if you don’t want to rely on easel and might wanna run UGS or something.
Can provide some detailed instructions on how to set it up if somebody needs it.
I’ve definitely tried several of these options. I really wanted to use “standard” open source tools to accomplish this, but VNC/X11 and VirtualHere are both options.
That being said, I felt that VirtualHere was quite a bit more invasive than I’d like. (it appeared to require kernel extensions on Mac).
I’m also not advanced enough to be using other CAM software, yet, but my opinion on how to connect will probably change as time goes on.
