I’ve always found the flashing and profile selection less intuitive than other parts of gSender and my experience answering questions on this forum tells me I’m not the only one.
My ATMega 2560 didn’t have grbl on it hence the no firmware settings.
My first issue is about the Profile selector. Unless I am mistaken the only thing the profile does is alter the settings of the firmware during flashing. I believe some people find it and think it needs to be set to their machine for gSender to work correctly. I think having it above the settings might imply that it needs to be set to change a firmware value or maybe that you need to flash as part of gSender setup.
Then when I was trying to figure out how to change the “Flash grblHAL” to “Flash grbl” I found this in gSender’s settings.
So I guess there are two place that you can now flash the firmware from. Why?
My other issue is that flashing shouldn’t be undertaken lightly or done without reason IMHO. I think there should be some warning about that because I’ve seen a bunch of posts where I think people have just flashed trying to get their mill working when just changing the settings would have sufficed.
Now that there are two places to flash from I’m wondering if maybe the best thing to do would be to eliminate the flashing from the firmware tool and just have that for changing firmware settings. Unless the profiles do more than I know about I think the small section in More Settings would be sufficient for flashing, restoring defaults and import/export of firmware values.
There is a remark in the SLB section, and I’m sure in the LB one aswell that warns against flashing as a quick fix. It does a great job, cause I fear it more than the altmill as wil animal. The altmill can seriously hurt you, but cripling your machine will realy.. realy hurt.
If I ever have to resort to flashing, it will be while sweat dripping like a meme of my brows, squirting from armpits and other semi cavities. I will also think, if I will not do it I will never get past the red line. So.. there’s a dillema for me. Will I bother sienci team with my problem? Prolly not. I’ll sweat it.. thinking, failure means a new SLB to play with!! Whooooho!
For me the warning works, and you will not see me recommend such a thing and if I even suggest it excist, I will post that same warning with it.
You suggesting of banning it all together rings with me on two distinct level. One side thinks, yeah that’s sane the other one gets a reddish neck and shouts WaTh aBoUt Ma Fr3eDoMs!!1
I too ignore the redneck in me and I feel you are probably right to at least bring the attention to this topic.
I read the warning the SLB docs as well but I think that most people don’t RTFM until they have a problem and it might be too late.
In the not so old days I felt like ritual sacrifice was needed to entreat the gods for a successful flash. Nowadays maybe it’s a little better and you can get away with a moment of silence.
I didn’t mean to suggest banning it. In Edges UI you can flash from two different screens and I was suggesting that maybe flashing being separate from just changing settings might be a good thing.
I definitely don’t think something potentially dangerous should be available in multiple places in the UI. That’s asking for trouble IMO.
The M in RTFM might stand for manual but in my case it stand for Michael.
I had only a few moments to react and clearly only crossread your post before semi automaticaly targeting my keyboard.
Clearly you didn’t state to ban the flash option and clearly that would be a no go thing. Giving it it’s own tab to eliminate comfusion and maybe even popping up the same warning as in the manual might be a good idea.
Maybe it does, I stay clear of that button like I would an active altmill, so what do I know.
There’s two places for now. We’re likely to remove the legacy firmware tool after some time after Edge becomes main - for now it’s a fallback. Documentation in the future should point you to use the Config firmware tool.
Internally, I’ve beaten the drum that profiles are confusing as we’ve stripped their purpose away over the versions. You are correct that now they just inform what defaults to restore. What’s likely to happen in the future (as in, already on the dev roadmap) is that profiles be extended to actual named Machine profiles containing custom configurations, firmware, port, etc. and you’ll solely interact with that rather than com ports.
As usual it sounds like the Sienci team has a plan to make things better.