Compatibility with FluidNC

[Brown.Tyler]

Hello,

Really love using gSender, you have done a great job with the development.

I realize gSender is compatible with GRBL, and FluidNC is based on GRBL32. Would it be possible to add compatibility with FluidNC?

Thanks

[Andy1]

Hello Tyler:

Welcome to the group.

I have a Longmill myself and I currently use FluidNC with gSender 1.1.1. Naturally some features of gSender are not required as FluidNC maintains its own configuration files. gSender lacks WIFI so unfortunately I cannot use my smart devices (Ipad and Iphone when using gSender ) but other than that it works fine.

[Brown.Tyler]

Hi Andy,

Thanks for the reply! I’ve been able to use gSender with FluidNC in the past on a TinyBee board.

I’m currently assembling an Openbuilds Lead 1515 and have a Spark Concepts XPro v5 on the way. I’m hoping it will work with that as well.

I’ve been able to get gSender to work with FluidNC in the past by logging into web portal on the control board and resetting the firmware. It’s a workaround.

Just hoping FluidNC will be supported natively in the near future!

[Andy1]

Hi Tyler

gSender is by far one of the best senders for the arduino microprocessor and I will continue to use it on my dedicated longmill 762x762mm laser. Moving forward with my new “PrintNC” project I have decided to use Barton Drings FluidNC and his ESP32 6 pack controller.

[itmesiddesh]

does it work with the grbl_esp32 firmware because I can’t seem to get it to work on my end

[Andy1]

Welcome

GRBL_esp32 has grown into FluidNC which can be reviewed here http://wiki.fluidnc.com/

You can also review a past post of mine here

Want a modification?

FluidNC might be a place to start reading and viewing about some cool possibilities like 4th axis and (5th and 6th axis). Barton Dring and his team have been working away here FluidNC on developing a lot of stuff… like a controller board for the next generation GRBL_ESP32. It offers “100% compatibily with the day to day operations of running GCode with a sender” , all very interesting and long overdue. Anyway have a read if this part of our hobby interests you

[kilroy]

It works perfectly with grbl esp32 (but not with fluidnc for various reasons). All you have to do is send a reset signal to grblesp32. Look at the shortcuts in gsender and send it (mine is shift-5 I think)

[Andy1]

Hmmm,

Works fine in FluidNC

on connection with gsender, type $bye in the console. A soft reset will be performed.

gsender ver 1.1.3
FluidNC ver 3.5.1

Good to go

[gwilki]

@Andy1 Are you running a Long Mill with the stock arduino uno - based controller?

[Andy1]

Hi Grant

No, I have chosen to use Bart Dring’s 6pack controller and fluidNC which is 32bit (More io’s more capability) rather than 8 bit.

I’m happy to say that I’ve had a Sienci Longmill CNC with the Arduino Uno 8 bit Controller for some years now and will continue to do so along with my trials.

Late in 2021 beginning of 2022 I began experimenting. .I published some stuff in the “Want a Modification” section of the forum at that time.

In my experiment I simply replaced the Arduino with a more flexible ESP-32 microcontroller. I wanted to have a rotary axis, spindle etc etc. Additionally, I wanted to test this using my gsender.

As I stated I chose the 6 pack controller (which uses an espressif esp32 Wroom chip )and FluidNC. This microcontroller has wifi, bluetooth, tablet support, smart device, sd card support.

Anyway the long and the short of it is FluidNC supports grbl ( Home · gnea/grbl Wiki · GitHub)

All that was necessary was to swap out one controller for another controller, since FluidNC is backward compatible with previous versions of grbl. Sienci gsender functions correctly. with the 6pack controller and FluidNC.

Andrew

[kilroy]

In fact…fluidnc works if you don’t use homing, soft limits and laser. I use all 3…. So I modified gsender code to make it work (mostly)… but i ended up reinstalling grbl-esp32 and now it’s perfect.

[kilroy]

$bye is a complete restart! You only need to send the reset command…

[itmesiddesh]

It did work! thank you.

[itmesiddesh]

I’ll definitely look it up

[Modulo]

Hello,

you can try this modify gSender:

Problem: Interruptions in motion during Jogging

The reset behavior of gSender has problems. In my setup, it would not connect to FluidNC at all because the JavaScript serialport module that gSender uses opens the port in a mode that results in the ESP32 restarting into bootloader mode, where it is expecting to upload new firmware. I solved that by modifying gSender to explicitly issue the proper hard-reset-into-run-mode sequence. I will tell the gSender folks about this. Meanwhile, if you want to patch it yourself, here is an easy way to do it without having to do a full recompile of gSender:

Edit the file C:\Program Files\gSender\resources\app\server\index.js - to do so you may need to edit as Administrator, or change the permissions on the file so an ordinary user can modify it.

Round about line 10242 you should see the line:

    _this2.emit('serialport:open', {

Just before that line, add this:

    _this2.connection.port.set({ dtr: false, rts: true });
    setTimeout(function() {
        _this2.connection.port.set({ dtr: false, rts: false });
    }, 300);

Save the file and restart gSender, and it should connect to FluidNC properly. At least that worked for me (and Bart too).

It worked for me perfectly, no Reset is needed anymore to connect!

[Modulo]

Short update, since 1.1.7 the mod above has not worked for me anymore. FluidNC runs on a evalboard on my machine. This evalboard uses the dtr and rts conneciton of the USB to serial converter to send the ESP into programming mode. This causes problems with the inital connection with gSender. Because of this i removed this connection physically on my eval board and leave only the RX ant TX pins of the serial line connected to my ESP. Now i synchronize gSender with FluidNC by typing $Bye into the console after connecting gSender to the serial port. This works perfectly for me!

[mjmnz]

Hi, I have a large format cnc mill that I use to process wood, HDPE and aluminium. I originally built an Ooznest design run with LinuxCNC on an old PC. Living near the ocean the PC psu kept blowing power supplies (salt air) so I switched to an Arduino GRBL system controlled through a RPi, I switched to an ESP32 controller (RootCNC) which uses FluidNC. This is a really reliable configuration that I’m very happy with. I have been using bCNC and lately UGS but these seem to be quite dated in their UI. I’ve been watching the development of gSender and now I have installed it on a RPi 4, I’m loving it.

My initial request is for gSender to be fully compatible with FluidNC. I haven’t figured out how to make use of the fake config settings built into FluidNC, maybe that’s all I’ll need… in the meantime, excellent work Sienci, gSender looks like a great product.

[gwilki]

@mjmnz Welcome to the group, Maurice.

I have moved your post to the gSender/Suggestion category. The gSender group at Sienci monitors this category and will, no doubt, consider your request.

[Machined-In-Wood]

I’d like to 2nd this! I have 3 machines altogether - 2 of them are Masso G3 based but the 3rd is FluidNC running on a Root controller. It seems to mostly work with G Sender, and I LOVE G Sender, but there are definitely some issues that I’ve been running into here and there.

Before I started my business 5 years ago, I was a software developer for Bose. If you have anything you need me to test, I’d be happy to help.