So my X Carve is in the garage, and I use an old laptop to run it and everything is working well. I do most of my designing from my home computer, where it is air conditioned. It would be nice to be able to design and actually run my gcode without going to the garage, and to see the bit movement, such as in UGS. So, for the fun of it, I pulled out an old Arduino UNO I had lying around from an led project I worked on years ago. I loaded grbl onto it, ran Easel, and the Carve button was green! So, in UGS, I can actually run my gcode and watch the cut path and determine if I want to make any changes. I can also play with the grbl commands, as I’m still learning what they do. About the only thing I can’t do is homing switches and probe commands, unless I determine where the wiring hooks up on the Uno, and set up some dummy switches.
You can fake them too. I do a lot of testing with just an Arduino.
I hook up the X, Y, Z, and probe lines to a NO switch. When my Arduino comes up locked I initiate the homing sequence. Then I press my testing switch after issuing the $H command. Press the switch four times at about 1 second intervals. It takes some practice, but you can do it. Pressing the switch with the probe hooked in doesn’t cause any issues because you are not running a probe command. Later you can test the probe command as you are not messing with the homing switches.
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