gSender Edge - 1.5.0-Edge3 - All New UI!

[KGN]

Hey folks,

We’re releasing an early, new version of Edge with preliminary work done on the new user experience today.

As previously mentioned, our goals for this Edge cycle are:

• Maintaining gSender primary principles of simplistic unopinionated controls, substitute technical jargon for simple language, and only showing functionality that you need for your specific machine.
• Better support for various screen sizes (from desktop down to phone) and more intuitive, usable touchscreen support.
• More thought into use of space for existing features to not feel like an afterthought and create space for new features to slot in.
• Lower technical debt on the front-end side of the application.

We’re excited to bring you a very early version of our design posted earlier this year to start the feedback process rolling. You can find the discussion on the UI refresh here:

https://forum.sienci.com/t/gsender-edge-new-u-and-a-call-for-feedback

Much of our effort early on has been dedicated to backend changes, tooling and technology changes, and the “main” control UI of the software. As such, some longstanding features such as surfacing, calibration, etc. are not included in this release - rest assured that these will be coming shortly as we iterate through the remaining features to bring them in line with the UI refresh. There was an enormous effort on the “plumbing” side of things to future proof gSender and now that that’s out of the way, feature development should be quick.

Some things you’ll notice on the new “Control” UI:

• Updated jog controls with a new design. Rotary is now a first-class citizen if your firmware reports that it supports one and you’ll find the A jog where you’d expect.

• DRO section slightly reworked - Go To and Zero now separated, A axis is included if your firmware reports it exists or rotary toggled on, and single axis homing is better integrated into the experience with a single toggle.

• Spindle and Feed overrides now more closely associated with the other workflow controls to make sure your speeds are set correctly before starting a job and if anything goes wrong you have a single place to look to control the job.

• Some redesign to secondary widgets to support touch screen format
  
  

We’re excited to hear your thoughts in this early stages of the Edge cycle. We’re optimistic that with the work put into the technology side of things we’ll be bringing you new and updated features on a 2-3 week cycle.

As always with Edge, please be aware that this is early access software - things will break, not work, or otherwise cause problems. If you are relying on your machine for a time sensitive or expensive project, it’s recommended not using Edge. That said, users are able to have both Edge and main gSender installed on their computer at once and have the choice of what to run.

Release artifacts can be found, as always, on Github:

Release v1.5.0-EDGE3 · Sienci-Labs/gsender

[Soxone]

I like the looks of the new UI but I have to ask…are we to comment on what is not working (I have a long list of stuff) or do you want comments on the look of the new UI…as it stands the new UI looks great but the software is just not useable due to so many things not working properly.

[chrismakesstuff]

Yeah anything related to the UI or the usability let us know. It’ll help us know what things we should prioritize as we continue to roll out the remaining missing functionality

[webbit_NJ]

Hello!
Here is some feedback.
Just installed and found GUI issues, did not run any job.

Note: My Laptop runs at resolution:

I now have a vertical scroll bar that was not there in previous version:

What is the usage of the “Hamburger Button”? It does nothing on my end…

In the “Rotary” tabs the text is cut off by the horizontal scrollbar

When i go the “Preferences”, i encounter these issues:

1-The “About” Tab show this unrecoverable error, have to close and restart app

2-While testing the switching from MM to IN, i got to be in both modes:

3-In the “Rotary” tab, there seem to be a Text field that i cannot see completely.

Also, even if the “Reconnect Automatically” is checked, i always have to hit the “Connect CNC on COMx” button, normal?

Also see the IP Entry below the radio button, it seems messed up.

Don’t get me wrong, i really like the new appearance, just wanted to report the things i saw possibly related to the running resolution.

Great job!

[chrismakesstuff]

Thanks @webbit_NJ, some new ones that you noticed that we hadn’t come upon yet. Glad to hear you like how it’s looking!

This first go is certainly still rough: we’ll look at the menus, the hamburger will be functional maybe on version 3, and hopefully simple scroll stuff taken care of for version 2. Next version (2) we’re still aiming to focus on getting in remaining missing features first like calibration, diagnostics, surfacing, etc. but it feels like we’ve got some good momentum now that all the back-end stuff is mostly in the rear-view

[Soxone]

1: Tried to import macros…they imported ok but it looks like they were added on to the existing mac ros…another import did the same…each import expands the macro list with the same ones.

2: Imported general settings from gSender 1.4.10 and got this error…no way out from here had to restart gSender

3: Screen cuts off (top and bottom) at around 35 units…can’t zoom out far enough to see AltMill bed limits

4: View cube overlaps visualizer area

5: In full screen mode gSender is to big vertically for my display (1920x1080)…the scroll bar is nice but the software should scale automatically to fit the current screen resolution on the PC

Overall the look and feel of the new UI is much improved over the current gSender…great job so far… I look forward to the finished program

[bighouse]

The UI is looking nice, with the IP address GUI issue in the preferences, I can’t connect to my SLB.
I do have one wish list item if we can view the loaded gcode file. I like to review the header to ensure I have a dwell and look at any comments in the file.

[FBWoodcraft]

I tried uploading gSender settings, Macros & Firmware did upload, but Settings resulted in a ‘Not Found :(’ error and locked up the app.
Others have already noted the Network Connection issue.

Homing and work station functions worked. I like the new location of the WS drop down. Jogging control buttons are better, but could still be increased in size.

Toolpath functions worked, I like the tool progress display.
When clicking the pause and stop which is the same as gSender 1.4.0, Z should return to safe height. Staying in the cut causes wood burn and can cause broken bits.
The Start from line function; it shows 0 for last line.

Location section: Arrangement works. Buttons need to be larger with a bit more seperation. Like the Go To drop down, though the button should be like the Home button, and labled Go To.
The corner buttons are good, but need to have a Pop Up to confirm the command.

I know in Canada, Metric is the standard. But since many of us have lived with Imperial for a lifetime, when we select inches is it not possible for the app to show ALL references to the selected standard. It gets confusing for some to be metric and others in inches.

[FBWoodcraft]

One other request: Can there be an Exit button for closing gSender? The X in the upper corner is very, very small.

[gwilki]

@Johan.Mota Johan. I appreciate that there may be a bit of a language issue, but it seems to me that these two posts deal with the same issue. Am I correct?

[gwilki]

@Johan.Mota I have no idea why any of your previous posts are not shown. I can assure you that I have not removed them. That said, I did just delete the duplicate post about making the buttons in gSender larger to better accommodate touch screens.

I just looked into your posting stats and they show that you have made 4 posts. All of them are on the forum. So, whatever has caused others not to be posted is not a function of the forum itself or any of the Sienci personnel.

[KGN]

Hey folks, we’re back with another Edge release, adding a few new features and functionalities, on top of catching us up to any changes that made it into 1.4.10.

As always, Edge is beta quality software - so please be aware that things can and will go wrong. Please use your brain when it comes to using Edge for deadlines/projects.

Firmware detection

gSender now detects your firmware flavour on connection and chooses the controller for you! No longer do you have to worry about forgetting to swap firmwares when connecting to different machines or connecting to a new machine. We hope this allows an easier, more plug-and-play experience when connecting to a machine for all users and less situations where behaviour is not what’s intended because the user chose the wrong firmware to connect with.

We’ve made some assumptions - if you’re connecting with ethernet, for example, it will default to grblHAL.

Let us know how this works for you! We’re especially looking for feedback from people using non-Sienci boards to make sure we’ve worked through the edge cases.

Settings and EEPROM

Settings and the firmware tool have been combined into a new Configuration tool for a one stop shop in setting up your machine. We’re hopeful that having settings and EEPROM more closely grouped allows the user a more straight forward experience in configuring their CNC.

Groups should make sense from a high level - for example, the Spindle contains both the settings for gSender to enable the tab and set laser/spindle max and min power, along with any EEPROM settings relevant to configuring your spindle. In cases where grblHAL supports natively some functionality such as laser offsets, the setting will use those EEPROM values instead of the local values for a more seamless user experience and less confusion (what value is going to be used, the one in EEPROM or the one in gSender settings?).

There was a last second emergent issue with some EEPROM controls but the legacy firmware tool is available for the time being

There are some slight behaviour changes. Settings must be applied instead of automatically saving, for example. We hope there is not too much of a learning curve - we’re excited to hear feedback on both groupings and how it functions.

Machine Information

We’ve added an easy interactable information modal to let you know about both current firmware modals and pin status. Some of this information was available in the old user interface within the diagnostic tool, but we hope having a single cohesive spot on the main interface will be helpful to non-novice users.

Notifications

We’ve made some changes to application notifications. No longer will a toast with relevant information get missed- you now have history of application notifications.

Various other tweaks

There’s a number of other tweaks and fixes from the first release, including the minimize handler and active tool indicator working, rotary A controls appearing in the correct situations for vanilla GRBL, no more -0.000 and more.

The next release should largely be focused on the last remaining tools (such as tool changing) and responsiveness/mobile control.

gSender EDGE can be downloaded from Github:

Release v1.5.0-Edge-2 · Sienci-Labs/gsender

And as always, thanks for your feedback and reports throughout the EDGE process. We’re hopeful as Edge becomes more feature complete, we’ll receive a wider variety of feedback from all user types.

[Soxone]

Edge 2 looking better with this release. I see some problems on my laptop running 1920x1080 with 100% scaling… these were mostly cosmetic… however the program has a problem running with a screen scaling factor other than 100%.

1; With a preferred units change the visualizer area changes properly but the ‘rapid, normal, precise’ readout does not reflect the change of units they remain on MM.

2: Clicking the Load File button caused the previous gcode file to be loaded, not the file intended…same thing happened with the ‘reload file’ button. This was an intermittent behavior (this was more pronounced with screen scaling higher than 100%)

3: The program did some unexpected things when I set the display to 125% scaling…(which is the recommended setting by Windows on my laptop) the bottom of the main screen cuts off a portion of itself and the file load, reload buttons exhibited some more unexpected behavior…also the settings page not only scrolled the subsections but the entire settings window as well when using the mouse wheel.

4: The visualizer area still cuts off at around 38 units which keeps the full 48x48 Altmill bed from being displayed on the grid. This happened independently from the screen scaling.

This is looking to be a very good replacement for the current gsender. Each iteration gets better and better.

[martindg]

Just downloaded this (1.5.0-Edge 2) and taking first look but haven’t tried it out on my machine. I have a Onefinity OG Woodworker running of the SLB (so much better than the BuildBotics) and been using gSender for a couple years. Anyway, my question relates to the rotary. My rotary (custom built on my machine) actually runs parallel to the Y axis so I guess this is more typically a B axis and not an A axis. I also added a free standing driver for my ‘A’ axis. Anyway, in my Vectric software I wrap the X axis and have a modified post to accomplish this. It works great in 1.4.10. I can still jog X Y and Z along with A which is helpful i getting my X axis aligned with the rotary. Again not having connected my machine to the Edge version it appears that the jog controls with rotary activated only provide jog access to A, X and Z. For those with rotary running on a external driver why would you not provide jogging access to all 4 axes? Also, the visualizer in 1.4.10 really doesn’t like the wrapped X axis as it seems to assume that the Y axis is ‘wrapped’ and the visualization of my files is pretty whacky. Other than this issues I really like the look so far.

[R.Portman]

Chris,

I retired with 40 years of electronics hardware design.

A successful product is when hardware, firmware and software developers work closely together and most importantly fully understanding the wants and needs of the customer.

Secondly, is fully embracing the KISS principle. (Keep It Simple, Stupid). Install the features the customer needs and limit the stuff the customer ‘wants’.

In a major project five years before my retirement, we provided the near final hardware/software product to the customer for evaluation and approval.

We had weeks of testing and many 100,000 test passes without an error.

Soon after the customer received the initial units, we began receiving failure notices from the customer.
We could not reproduce the issues at our end.
We shipped the unit back to us and still couldn’t reproduce the errors. This back and forth went on for nearly a month. Finally we received permission to go to the customers site and observe our product in their environment. Sure enough we saw the errors. Our lead SW engineer swapped in his laptop (because it has other diagnostic sw to view the code in action).
We ran the tests, again and again without errors.

Looking at their computer, it was a few years old, older OS, no dedicated graphics, smaller RAM , HDD, etc.,

The lead SW engineer’s laptop was new, powerful, dedicated graphics, lots of RAM, SSD etc, ie. Top of the line.

We came back to our facility and dug up an old laptop and came very close to replicating the customer’s computer.

Needless to say, the errors exposed themselves.
Several locations in the software had to be enhanced to account for the additional delays caused by the older computer.

Some of your gSender customers have no problems. Other customers do, and not all the same problems.

I challenge you to rethink your testing strategy and to require your sw/fw designers to use old and new computers to test gSender.

[KGN]

Hey folks,

Edge has seen quite a bit of work with regards to feature parity and we’re excited to release our next iteration.

Stats Page

Older versions of gSender had numerous related tool in relatively disparate places - things like diagnostics and configuration overview, jobs listings, and maintenance tasks were all in separate areas. We’ve combined them into a sort of machine dashboard, where you can get a quick at-a-glance overview of your machine and recent jobs.

On top of the quick overview, you can still drill down into any specific sections you could previously. We hope grouping these related functionalities on top of future iteration on those features themselves will help users diagnose any problems with their machines.

Diagnostics also has also been updated (like in Main) to generate a ZIP file which includes the former diagnostic file, any loaded gcode files, on top of your current settings for easier support.

New Tools

Surfacing, XY Squaring, and Movement Tuning have all been ported over with some UI/look and feel improvements. You can access them under the “Tools” section.

Tool Changing/Helper

Tool changing wizards should be appearing again within the UI. When a tool change is parsed, the new “Helper” area should become active in order to guide you through your tool change process depending on the strategy you’ve chosen.

In the future, the plan for the Helper is to be expanded to guide the user through several processes/issues if enabled.

Config Updates

The configuration section has had a number of styling and behaviour tweaks to better group related application and eeprom settings.

You might notice that related EEPROM and application settings can now intermingle rather than being kept to distinct sections. We’ve added an indicator to more clearly differentiate when something is updating something in EEPROM (the microchip) and when something is updating an appliation setting. We hope to hear more feedback on this distinction moving forward.

Nav bar

One point of feedback we’ve had is that it’s not always clear how to get back to where you want to be to run a job. We’ve made some updates to the look and feel of the nav bar to both highlight the Carve (formerly known as “Control”) view and make it more obvious which application section you’re currently in as well as increased the visual hierarchy of the Carve section itself.

We’re also planning on adding breadcrumb navigation to certain sections of the application (such as tools) for easier navigation when drilling down into specific tools themselves so you always have an easy way to get back to where you want to be.

Shortcuts

Keyboard shortcut implementation is ongoing but we’ve added a subset of keyboard shortcuts. The shortcut tool can be accessed under “Tools”.

Gamepad support is upcoming.

Other

• Various bugs and other UI tweaks are included in this version.
• Small features such as console clearing added
• Nav minimizer removed
• Pinnable machine status flyout
• Support for new spindle message parsing on upcoming firmware release
• Flipped visualizer camera cube and updated camera view to match
• Console input history again arrow scrollable
• Various text/copy tweaks
• Start from Line shows proper last run line

What’s next

Since we’re nearing feature parity, the next version of Edge is going to focus on the following things:

• Responsiveness and UI cohesiveness
• Dark Mode
• Remote Mode/Portrait Mode
• Gamepad support
• Breadcrumb navigation

Download

As always, Edge can be found on Github:

Release v1.5.0-EDGE3 · Sienci-Labs/gsender

[Jens]

I recently had to do a bunch of surfacing jobs. One thing that has bugged me about the surfacing helper is that the very first thing that happens when you start a surfacing run is that the tool drops down to I think 3mm above the zero position before rapidly traversing to the start point.
IMHO this is an incorrect sequence - the tool should stay high and only drop down to the 3 mm position AFTER it is at the start position.

If this has already been addressed then I apologize for bringing it up.

[Mattydboom]

Super hyped to try this out on my machine now that Tool changes are working!!

Being at my office PC and looking around this version, I may have found one minor issue…
With the software running but no machine connected, when I try to load a job into the viewer, I am met with the below white error screen. Re-launching the software doesn’t clear it until I select ‘force re-load’.