gSender Error opening port on Marlin

gSender ❓ Question
1

Hi all,

I hope I put this post in the right category, happy to move it if not!

I am running into an issue with my initial setup of gSender. I setup gSender on a Debian box I have, and have it connected up to my CNC (Snapmaker 2.0) over USB. The Snapmaker 2.0 uses Marlin, and when I attempt to connect gSender to it, I receive an error of “Error opening port /dev/ttyUSB0”. I’m not sure where I can get more information on why it may be failing to open the port. Is there a way to enable more detail diagnostics or check error logs?

Additional info: I’ve restarted the machine(s) already, and also I have a OctoPrint setup as well (basically gSender for 3D printing), this connects to the Snapmaker just fine, so I know the computer and COM port are connected properly and functioning.

Any help that can be provided would be greatly appreciated!

2

We don’t support Marlin, only grbl and grblHAL.

3

Wow! thank you for the quick reply.

I had assumed gSender would support Marlin since cncjs appeared to.

Would that explain my issue with connecting? I’m pretty sure if I sent GRBL commands to Marlin everything would be just fine (I’ve done this before).

4

I’m not familiar enough with Marlin as a firmware but at a quick glance it looks like there is some code related to setting DTR/RTS pins on connection for Marlin that wouldn’t be present using the grbl/grblHAL controllers.

5

Oh okay, well that would make sense then. Are there logs I could check to confirm that?

Do you know how significant the effort would be to add Marlin support? (I’d be happy to make a branch and open a PR, I’m just wondering how easily that may be done)

Quick Edit:

Does gSender support GRBL-M3?

6

Tyler - I recently created a new Debian system for my CNC, and had trouble connecting to a CNC controller (OpenBuilds BlackBox) that I had used successfully with gSender. In my case it was a port permissions error. Might be worth a check.

As Kevin mentioned, gSender is built for grbl/grblHAL, so not sure if this’ll end up working for you or not, but easy enough to check.

You need to make sure that your user is in the -dialout- group for access to the USB port.

You can check your setup by issuing the id command. Look for the group ‘dialout.’

Here is my correct output:

uid=1000(osh) gid=1000(osh) groups=1000(osh),20(dialout),24(cdrom),25(floppy),29(audio),30(dip),44(video),46(plugdev),100(users),106(netdev),111(bluetooth),113(lpadmin),116(scanner)

If you are NOT showing as in group dialout, issue the following:

sudo usermod -a -G dialout your_user_name

(This assume your user has sudo access for elevated commands.)

You will have to log out and log back in to your Debian system to test.

John

7

That indeed did the trick!

I can successfully use the console, but none of the jog commands are enabled for some reason, wonder if this is because of GRBL or if there’s custom setup I need to do to enable them?

8

Glad to hear that helped!

For initial testing, I’d make sure both hard and soft limits are disabled.
But beyond that – not sure.