From another thread------
Russ, if you would like to do this for the experience that’s great, but if your main goal is just to get homing working and a way to prevent your X-carve moving outside the workspace and crashing there is a simple way to do that with what you already have.
Ok, back to this thread.
My bad, by Easel Local I meant the driver portion that the web program uses to talk with your machine. If you can jog your machine with Easel then it’s already there.
Here’s an overview to help out with the discussion. The Arduino runs some firmware that is
called Grbl. The gShield does not have any software capability it is mainly the stepper motor drivers and some pass through pins to the Arduino.
You can send commands to Grbl via the serial port.
Grbl stores some configuration information about the machine it is controlling. $$ is a Grbl command that tells Grbl to output a list of the parameters settings that it has stored on the Arduino. You can issue other Grbl $ commands which will change the parameter settings and perform a few operations. For example, the command $H is a Grbl command that tells Grbl to home the machine.
In addition to the above functionality the Grbl software will accept G-code commands and execute them to accomplish a CNC task such as move the spindle to a particular location.
The G-code resides on your computer in a text file that any text editor can open. Several programs have been developed to send this file to the Arduino for Grbl to process. Easel is one these programs which also contains other functionality. If you wanted to you could pass each command to Grbl using a terminal program, but it sure is nice to have something else do it as many designs require 100s of thousands of G-code commands.