gSender Edge - New U and a call for feedback

[drilling-vagueness]

I’m running gSender 1.5.0-Edge-6 on Windows for the following comments.

Agreed @FBWoodcraft, every button that can move the machine should (a) be visually similar and (b) have a tooltip (at least for mouse-based OSes) that describes what exactly it’s about to do. I honestly don’t find the terminology very plain to understand yet, there is far too much reliance on muscle memory in this app, and discoverability is pretty low for a system that moves a cutter through physical space. What does that paper airplane button do (and what’s it supposed to do)?

Also what does park do? How is it functionally different from home, or the “travel to the back right corner” button? Why do we need so many canned routines to get to the same place, and no ways (?) to get to a preset tool change location?
Figured out how to set the parking location. I would still prefer to have “parking location” different from “manual tool change location” for use in later post/macro/etc.
When setting the parking location, the number fields have gone to some effort to be non-standard: deleting up to a decimal point will delete the decimal point as well (?!?), and deleting all digits results in an unrecoverable NaN (steps to recover: grab again and try not to “over edit” on accident).

When the machine is transiting around based on a pre-canned destination (e.g. home), the manual jog buttons “disable”, the stop button doesn’t, but the stop button (IMO the most important button in the app) doesn’t seem to work?!? Is this intended behavior?

Echoing many other comments here: the visualizer really doesn’t do much for the amount of space it takes up. If this is intended to be improved I guess that’s fine to see a WIP, but honestly the interactive part of the UI should be much more prominent relative to “informational display”. To truly make the visualizer useful, please visualize the soft limits volume e.g. table, location of tool sensors, keep the axis labels always in view (for some reason I assumed red was Y and green was X, to mirror the default “home” iso view in e.g. Fusion that looks at sides front/left/top, not front/right/top). The visualizer scale is almost unusable if I want to see home and work 0 at the same time on a 4ft x 4ft machine - scale-dependent rendering would help immensely to change grid sizing etc.

Not trying to rain on anyone’s development parade, but IMO start with system safety, then usability, and finally styling. At this point in software development history it’s not worth the effort to invent your own widget set unless you’re a massive company like Spotify. Use an established cross-platform system like Flutter, get the basics working solidly, and then skin any custom controls (e.g., jog directions) as needed, keeping the rest as stock as possible. Things like having a busted number entry field for park location just should not be possible with a modern widget framework.

[chrismakesstuff]

This is something we might be able to do in the firmware

[chrismakesstuff]

Thanks for the feedback, Edge is nearing completion but there are certainly still small changes we could make:

1. If you notice, every button that moves the machine in gSender is blue, we could still consider tooltips though
2. Parking location and tool change location can be two separate places, they don’t have to be the same. There’s also always the option to make your own macros that can move your machine infinitely many fixed locations
3. We’ll look into the behaviour for the Parking location data entry
4. Stop button should always be accessible for those long travel distances, if it isn’t then that can be easily fixed
5. Visualizer is definitely an area we have some more plans for like scale-dependent rendering which I’ll make sure is addressed sooner. Regarding space it takes up there are many others that prefer a larger visualizer, but it also may be the case where if you’re looking at it on a larger monitor it’s excessively large, and this is just because we’re still going through tweaks for responsiveness
6. I appreciate what you’re saying here, but about a third of your comments above are pointing at styling issues and another third are usability, so I don’t think it’s fair to evaluate our work so far as being misguided or being done in the wrong order. For example there’s more going on behind the scenes than simple data entry since we also have to be refreshing values at certain periods of time, temporarily using values to change other settings being displayed, and also handle setting where some are stored locally and some are stored on the machine - so we certainly are using pre-made components when we can but other cases require a bit more work than that. We’ve got a solid base we’ve rebuilt Edge off of, and there are certainly many many features we’re having to port over as well as some new ones we’re adding, and it just takes time to iron all that out

[chrismakesstuff]

@Soxone based on your last piece of feedback I’m pretty confident all your feedback points have been addressed except the render distance which is definitely something we can update. gSender Edge - 1.5.0-Edge-6 - All New UI! - #19 by Soxone

Is there anything else in particular we’ve missed about your feedback? I’ve looked through all your post on the Forum you’ve ever made and can’t find anything else you’ve mentioned. I think it’s reasonable for me to say that if you don’t tell us what you’re looking to have fixed then I don’t think it’s fair for you to be upset that those things haven’t been fixed. Also I want to mention that just because the new functions we’re working on aren’t useful to you doesn’t mean they’re not useful to others.

[EVH5150]

As a newbie to this world, I learned about this company only after someone gave me a Genmitsu PROverXL 6050 Plus. They were so frustrated with it that they wanted it gone. I know this is not a great machine like the LongMill.

Is there a chance that profiles of other vendors might be included in this software?

I would like to get my skills up to justify purchasing a LongMill. I apologize if I am abusing the purpose of this software.

[Glenn71]

Will it be possible to move “console” next to “probe”?
I have not discovered if this is possible.

[drilling-vagueness]

Thanks @chrismakesstuff.

Please let me know how I can make this feedback more constructive for you.

I appreciate the work you’re putting into gSender, and I appreciate you open sourcing it. I’ve got enough rabbit holes on deck already and would prefer not to dive into the source, but understand that this is always an option and is ultimately one of the appeals of gSender over similar software.

I’m not trying to give you a hard time, I’m just trying to help converge on a safe and efficient and discoverable system. It’s easy to forget as a developer that most of us as users don’t live in the codebase and have a deep understanding of what’s going on that then gets overlaid on what is exposed in the UI. Typically all we see to discover how the system works is the UI. If there are good reasons to diverge from simplicity then by all means, but it should be obvious why something has diverged. If anything, different ways of doing or showing something just for the sake of it means more code paths and thus surface areas for bugs.

The following notes are relative to 1.5.0-Edge-7 on Windows.

1. The Home and Probe buttons are not “will do a physical thing” blue. Over here the Home button moves the machine, not sure about Probe yet. Following this logic, I’d like to nominate the spindle controls For (M3) and Rev (M4) to be rendered in “will do a physical thing” blue, and Stop (M5) to be “stop doing a physical thing” red. I guess same for the coolant buttons. For bonus points remove the gcode from the spindle buttons, For, Rev, Stop as no other buttons in the UI display their gcode directly in the button text (e.g., Coolant buttons don’t show M7/M7/M9 directly in the button text). Gcode does seem ideal for a tool tip for all buttons that have a corresponding gcode string that will be sent. Spindle Stop and Coolant Off might benefit from being the same word?

2. Blue is … at least two or three different blues (e.g., Y+ vs. Park vs. Rapid/Normal/Precise radio button) - are these functionally the same blue, or is one a disabled/greyed out blue? It’s not obvious if these are intended to behave the same or differently just by looking.

3. There are a lot of blue things (e.g., DRO machine coords, checkbox sliders, Probe, Macros, Spindle… current tab indicator, the Probe radio buttons) that don’t move the machine, so it’s kind of hard to learn the “blue UI elements move the machine” rule just from examining the UI.

4. I agree that many things can be easily fixed. The Stop button seems high on the regression test list, even for an edge or beta release. I understand many things being not-quite-done in Edge, but IMO this shouldn’t be one of them.

5. I understand state management is difficult, and even more so given the state being cached in the app vs. the machine controller. However, I do think that UIs that make changes to the physical world have a higher bar to clear to get this correct. Most software in 2025 has or should have “infinite undo” state management where as a user you can’t (easily) break things irrecoverably; things that modify the physical world do not have this luxury. I understand if Sienci thinks differently.

6. If I switch the controller off while gSender is connected, the “status trapezoid” recognizes this and shows a state of Disconnected, but the connection … menu thing still thinks it’s connected to the controller. I then have to disconnect my disconnected sender before I can reconnect it again. This seems to be the case independent of USB or Ethernet.
   

   

7. Thank you for fixing the homing synchronization in Edge-7. Edge-6 would often not recognize when homing completed, and get stuck in a perpetual homing state where greyed out jog buttons … would still jog the machine.

8. Thank you for fixing the paper airplane button, it now opens the Go To Location flyout. Based on this, I might suggest to make the paper airplane button white, and the Go! button in the flyout “will do a physical thing” blue. Also dismissing the flyout without doing anything here has a bit of animation jank in the fade for some reason.

9. The Non-default config toggle is great, but still shows a lot of grey (not “changed yellow”) sections. If the “chip” icon in the config list is intended to indicate a profile setting, it would be great if that were tied back to the profile selector to make it clearer that this is what’s going on.
   

   

Thanks again for all of the effort on this.

[Gravesj1s]

@chrismakesstuff

An obvious bug in both gsender and gsender edge 7 with the fixed tool probe . It existed in edge 6 as well last / current version of gsender .

Grab location fails to configure z tool offset . Alarms are triggered with soft limits disabled and if hard limits are disabled the machine will trigger estop .

[chrismakesstuff]

The way profiles work in gSender is they only really make a difference if you want to revert your machine firmware settings to ‘default’ and realistically we can only do that with official support from that vendor. Other than that, ‘adding a profile’ is basically just adding a name to the list, so if it’s ok by you to not have your machine explicitly listed then you should be good to go also definitely don’t feel bad for asking, you’re certainly not abusing the purpose of the software and ultimately it never hurts to ask

@Glenn71 we’re not sure yet how we want to handle tabs and ordering, but what I will say is that on the next version tabs for rotary, spindle, and coolant should all be able to hide away using settings so that they’re not in your way if you don’t have them. This should make console much easier to access, and also much closer to the probing tab

@drilling-vagueness I appreciate your understanding and I respect you point of view, definitely. We’ll keep doing our best to make the right solution to the problem, and use user feedback to help steer that the best way possible. With that said thanks for all the new feedback, I’ll go through it ASAP:

1. Yes Home I noticed the other day should be blue, hopefully that will soon be updated. Probe is not blue since clicking it bring up another dialog first to make some confirmations, then the button to make those confirmations is then blue so I hope that makes sense. Regarding your remaining nominations, I think that’s a valid suggestion that I’d not thought about, so I’ll see what I can do about it
2. / 3. I see what you’re saying about the different blues, I’ll think on this one as well
3. That’s fine for you to think, and I appreciate that, but you’ve already voiced this feedback and I’ve told you we’ll look into it so re-stating the issue isn’t going to help improve what’s already being done. Fundamentally there are so many things in a g-code sender that depending on the person they’ll consider it as ‘essential’, and somehow no one noticed this behaviour until now which means that it’s clearly not as important to others, just like there are features that others consider as important that you haven’t raised yet in your feedback.
4. I’m not sure what you’re referring to about state management as it pertains to the visualizer, if you could give some more clarity on this
5. We noticed this too, should be already fixed for the next release
6. Glad to hear homing sync is looking good now for you!
7. Good point on the white/blue for the airplane, I think that should be fixed. I’m not seeing the animation jank but we’ll look into it
8. I like your suggestion of putting the chip at the bottom to tie them together, I’ll think about how we could make that work. I think the issue you’re seeing of grey sections showing ‘might’ be fixed on the next build, but if not then let me know that it’s still not working and I’ll see what else we might be overlooking.

@Gravesj1s could you give me some more information for me to help you with this? Grabbing location seems fine to me, what aspect of it isn’t working for you? Also what alarm number are you seeing when soft limits are turned off, and where in the tool change process are you seeing the alarm? It doesn’t make sense to me that disabling hard limits triggers an e-stop either

[drilling-vagueness]

I see Edge-8 just dropped and release notes appear to have addressed a bunch of my concerns, thank you @chrismakesstuff! Looking forward to digging into this on the weekend when I get back.

Regarding state management I realized that the forum software appears to re-number numbered lists, so the numbers I was referencing got turned into … just a monotonic series

[justinbouchardw]

Hot Damn, been a while since I logged in. Edge looks great! Will try it out tonight.