Running X-Carve wirelessly

X-Carve
1

Hello all…

I’m new to the CNC world and I’m seriously considering purchasing the X-Carve. My question is…has anyone tried to run this machine wirelessly? My computer is in a separate room form where I would need to put the X-Carve. Just wondering if I could somehow network it?

Thanks,
Mike

2

Well, GRBL is open source, so I imagine you could stack an ethernet shield under your motor driver shield and add ethernet support to GRBL. I suspect there’s not enough space for it, and not enough spare compute power to keep up either. One of the newer Arduinos with more memory and more horsepower might well be needed to do it well. You could probably use WiFi as well, albeit with an even bigger memory footprint.

Have you considered just running an amplified USB cable instead? I’ve worked on projects where we extended USB and DVI to 30 metres or so.

3

It’s not really connected to the network but you can wire instead of the USB cable use an USB > CAT5 > USB solution which is very cheap and you can go as far as 100ft without problems.

But if you are only limited by say a wall, then you can connect by a long cable usb (about 16 ft/5 meters) or the longer one (about 32 ft/ 10 meters) and avoid problems.

4

You can also use a Raspberry Pi to control your X-Carve and send the G-code to it wirelessly:

5

I’m new to CNC, but have been using Octoprint with a 3D printer for the past year. Runs on raspberry pi and basically acts as a print server, streaming g-code to the printer. A quick search on shapeoko forum revealed a branch of the software suitable to communicate with grbl.

6

Also check out this

And this
http://wyolum.com/shapeoko-desktop-cnc-mill-build/

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7

Great suggestions! Thanks everyone!

8

Here’s another link that might help too:

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9

Great link, this is next!

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10

Hi
I was wondering if anyone had actually made this instructable work with Xcarve. http://instructables.com/id/Control-your-CNC-over-Wi-Fi/?ALLSTEPS
I am really new to anything Pi but have a strong interest on this solution.

Thanks.

11

Hi @NeilG,

Take a look here:

Edit: click the little right pointing arrow in the upper left corner for the full thread.

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