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Hi everybody. I’ve had my pro for about a year, and am (ready or not) at the point where I need to incorporate a UGS for better control over tool paths and to increase size and complexity of projects. The underlying problem is that I believe I have electrical interference that is disrupting the flow of code from easel to spindle. I have been unable to diagnose and address this properly and it is driving me a bit crazy.
I’ve followed Seth’s advice and downloaded Openbuilds- but the setup seems intimidating and I’m worried that I will somehow lose control with Easel if I start up with Openbuilds.
Does anyone have any advice or experience with this recently?
Thanks Sam! I’m checking it out now. It will be a tough sell at those prices just because I still have 2 years free on Easel but once I watch the tutorials I’ll pick up the free trial.
Do you have the Aspire version? Would this totally replace Easel as an interface to my X-carve pro?
Unfortunately inventables chose to alter the baud rate for the xcarve pro in the current version firmware, making some gcode sender software not compatible without putting the baud rate back to 115,200. But yeah, once baud rate is fixed, you’re totally correct.
But it’s a shame that they pushed a change to 100% of the xcp machines to fix a manufacturing detect in less than like 5% of them
Hello every one, this is exactly what I have been looking for. I have been trying to connect to UGS with the current GRBL v1.1h.xps20220134, with no luck. UGS tell me that "The setup wizard does not know how to setup this type of controller. After speaking to the UGS developer I was told some manufacturers are sometimes creative when modifying this text making it hard for them to parse and determine the version. He also told me that he recently changed the way they get the version and is available in the latest nightly build. I downloaded it with no luck. The below picture is what came from the console of UGS.
I have been thinking could I get the latest version of GRBL, V1.1h, and upload it to the X-Carve Pro.
So in conclusion do you feel that if I were to upload the latest version of GRBL using easel I should be ok?
Hey Neil. I’ve been having problems in Easel recently with excessive load times and carves stopping repeatedly. Easel seems so user-friendly that I don’t know where to begin diagnosing the issue- so I feel like I tried everything. Twice. It’s still hit-or-miss, but I had a successful 5 hour carve yesterday with essentially nothing else running in the shop.
Specifically I’m looking for a deeper understanding of the machine and how it’s controlled. I love Easel for it’s simplicity and as someone with no experience 1 year ago, I am probably an intermediate user. But now I want to learn to read and edit the code. I’d like to use a small tablet as my dedicated control instead of the keyboard. Most importantly, I’d like something on my hard drive to record the code in it’s entirety and have it ready to send to the machine. I’m not sure about this, but it seems like an interruption in internet service mid-carve can be enough to throw the carve. Can anybody confirm or refute this?
Unfortunately I’m not even totally clear on the terminology.
See that top line: “…COM3:115200” The Xcarve Pro firmware has changed the baud rate from 115200 to like 4500 i believe.
115,200 is the grbl standard so you will need to modify the Xcarve Pro baud rate setting OR back date the firmware. I suggest contacting inventables and telling them that you want your CNC to operate on 115,200 baud rate just like every other grbl based cnc on the market. and they will likely assist in back dating the firmware to the last version supporting 115,200…
OR i believe the baud rate can be changed within the device manager, but without an Xcarve Pro of my own I’m not sure whether the device manager setting change will be successful or not…
Internet connection is not utilized to calculate toolpaths nor throughout the carve. However IF your browser does refresh mid carve that would cause the usb connection to drop out. BUT it is more likely that sleep/power savings settings OR the USB selective suspend setting (How to Disable USB Selective Suspend and stop your CNC carves from fai – His N Hers Handcrafted) OR an issue with the PC’s 5volt output that gets send down the usb cable to the controller board to power the Arduino, if this drops too low of voltage the cnc will also loose coms for a sec and end the carve. (this is often resolved with a Externally Powered USB Hub) Notice the power plug…
IF you’d like to test that the internet connection does not matter, prepare a simple carve and perform it in air above the wasteboard, and turn your PC to airplane mode, and you can toggle this off and on and it has zero effect on the carve (I’ve done this test to prove to a naysayer in the past) . . . But also inventables has said the same…
If you received this twice I am sorry, just realized to reply I had to put my response on the forum.
The have just sent a request to Inventables, let’s see what they say. If I get no response maybe we can communicate over the phone and we can work this stuff out.
I use gSender, which is a really great piece of software. I could not get UGS working for the reasons cited above. Connect to your machine at 57600 baud.
Hey Michael, thanks for the input! Are you using an x-carve machine with g-sender replacing easel altogether? Or is g-sender a link between easel and your Cnc? Im wondering if I could or would still incorporate Easel in a software ‘chain’ getting more refined results at each link. For instance, pull my images into easel- send the code to g-sender to choose tool paths or incorporate features easel does not have- then use g-sender to send the code to the machine?
Sorry if this is a dumb question.
Hi. I am using Vetric V-Carve Pro. Unlike Easel, it can produce g-code but has no real way of running it. I’m looking for easier ways of doing repeated runs, so a stand-alone runner is ideal.
They can certainly reduce the intake of EMI, however in my experience addressing the EMI outputting device(s) and reducing the EMI that they put out will be a better option than band-aiding other equipment with ferrites.
GSender is just as the name entails, it’s a “Sender” only. you certainly can use Easel, go to Project>Download Gcode and use Gsender so send the gcode file to the CNC for carving.
Not sure how helpful this is… but I’ve switched completely to Fusion360 for toolpath generation and using OpenBuilds.
You shouldn’t have a problem playing around with OpenBuilds’ software because it just connects to the machine — you can always e-stop if you get in trouble or feel like you need to bail.
Hello, after a week or so of messing with my machine to connect to UGS I was successful. The only thing that is not working properly is the Probe module.
I set the baud rate to the above figure and was able to connect. Now I did ask Inventables to send me the previous GRBL release and they basically told me no, in a nice way.
Also, something I figured out was that if you are using Vetric software to design do not USE the Post Processor that Inventables gives you, use the Post Processor that Vetric supplies for the X-Carve. The reason for this is because the Inventables Post Processor does not include the start/stop spindle code. you will also have to add a pause to give time for the spindle to spin up, this can be done within UGS configuration.
Currently I have a discussion about fixing the probe module.
