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- This wiki is a work in progress, it is not finished yet I am a long time fan of LinuxCNC. I have a Chinese 3040 CNC machine, and LinuxCNC operated it well for many years.
However it has 2 notable drawbacks:
- It works only on Linux PCs.
- It requires a parallel port to drive the CNC.
Hence, If i wanted to operate the CNC with my laptop, I could not, since its a Windows machine, and there is no parallel port. There are USB-to-parallel port adapters in the market, but since USB ports, by design, are not real-time hardware, These adapters can not cope with the precise timings needed for CNC stepper motor driving.
GrblCNC is look-alike version of LinuxCNC for Windows machines. To solve the missing parallel port issue, a small controller board is doing all the real-time driver operations, and is being controlled by GrblCNC via USB port. The controller board is running a firmware called Grbl which originally was developed by gnea. It had limited features as it was meant to run on a relatively weak Arduino board. But then came this great guy who ported grbl to some stronger controller boards, and added many features that makes it a very capable GCode driver that supports almost all codes LinuxCNC does. I decided to use the BluePill - a very small but powerful controller board based on STM32F103 chip. (costs only $2!!)
There are 4 steps:
- Prepare the hardware
- Flash the firmware into the controller
- Configure the controller based on your CNC machine
- Load your GCodes and start making!
