RPi on CNC

Bill Arnold

1974
Staff member
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8,621
Location
Thomasville, GA
I've been experimenting with setting up a Raspberry Pi 3b to control my SO2 CNC. So far, it's looking good but I need to learn more about a few things. I have an RPi3 loaded with UGS and can jog my SO2 but get an error when I try to send a gcode file to it. I've connected to the RPi using VNC, which works fine except for file transfer. I can connect to my Dropbox using the RPi browser and download a file, so that's OK - for now. Nest step is to figger out what else I need to get full control happening.
 
Very interesting....

No idea what could be going on without seeing the error message... Maybe it's a mismatch on the usb connection settings?

I have been looking at using Octoprint on my CNC. If only it would warm up here a bit. I'm all set to rewire and clean up my CNC control board situation. Going to print an enclosure for the TinyG and an RPI board to talk to it.
 
Back at it this morning.

The error message says: "Error while starting file stream: GRBL has not finished booting." I get responses when I send "$" and "$$".

I downloaded UGS v1.0.6 because that's what the github page said should work in Linux on RPi.

I'm starting UGS from the command line with: "java -jar -Xmx256m UniversalGcodeSender.jar" per the instructions.

The version of grbl in the Arduino on my SO2 is 0.9j.20150930:. I've been running that with no problem using a USB line from a desktop in my shop. I substituted the USB from the RPi for testing.

I found some instructions about running additional setup commands on the RPi and will try those now.
 
Back at it this morning.

The error message says: "Error while starting file stream: GRBL has not finished booting." I get responses when I send "$" and "$$".

I downloaded UGS v1.0.6 because that's what the github page said should work in Linux on RPi.

I'm starting UGS from the command line with: "java -jar -Xmx256m UniversalGcodeSender.jar" per the instructions.

The version of grbl in the Arduino on my SO2 is 0.9j.20150930:. I've been running that with no problem using a USB line from a desktop in my shop. I substituted the USB from the RPi for testing.

I found some instructions about running additional setup commands on the RPi and will try those now.

Googling that, someone mentioned that the UGS has to have it's baud rate set manually as the auto select doesn't work... http://www.shapeoko.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5185#p38040

I've had to do this on octopi also, so hope that is it.

Edit: Thinking back it was also the usb setting I had to manually set too.
 
Last edited:
In UGS, the port came up as /dev/ttyACM0 with a baud rate of 115200.

The page I found with additional setups is http://zapmaker.org/raspberry-pi/running-grbl-controller-on-raspberry-pi/

I ran the following:

sudo apt-get update (required for AlaMode)

sudo apt-get install xrdp

sudo apt-get install arduino (required for AlaMode) [For normal Pi, this step is optional, but good to have. NOTE: I got an error that not all items could be downloaded. I tried to repeat command by adding a --fix-missing, i.e. sudo apt-get install --fix-missing arduino but it didn't help. UPDATE: The latest download as of May 2013 doesn't have this problem]

sudo apt-get install libudev-dev

After running those four commands, I got a complete job of a relatively short carve. However, after a reboot, I'm back to square one!
 
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