gSender is awesome and my go to tool to connect to my Longmill, however, Estlcam has some cool features (besides being able to create g-code in it) such as surface scanning that I’d love to use, however, I’m a bit leery of a warning of “Estcam maybe damaging the hardware and pinouts (Longboard controller I assume)” and I’m not about to risk my longboard out of a feature I can live without but would be very nice to have
Hello @gwilki, would you mind pasting links of said forums? I did search the forums for Estlcam but none that show up by just searching “Estlcam” in all topics provide a link or discussion where anyone has successfully connected the longmill to Estlcam.
Hehe, sorry for being unclear myself, I meant to say I did search these (Sienci) forums for “Estlcam” and didn’t find anything.
I found a few where you post replies, but none where anyone mentions they successfully connect to Estlcam
OH, I see what you mean, nope, my apologies for any confusion, what I meant is controlling the Longmill through Estlcam, not creating g-code with it which you have to send to the Longmill through gSender… so essentially using Estlcam instead of gSender, the same way you’d use UGS instead of gSender.
See, Estcam comes with Estlcam and Estlcam Controller, with the controller you can connect/control the CNC machine directly the same way you do with gSender, it also has an added functionality (the one feature I’m truly interested in) of surface scanning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApBfHW7AhsM which needs use of the Controller application connecting/controlling directly the CNC machine to achieve.
Alas, I emailed Christian Knüll , Estlcam’s author asking him whether Estlcam can connect directly to the longmill and he just replied that it can’t… kinda surprised really, but not going to obsess over a feature, try my luck connecting and ruin the longboard in the process.
Hopefully surface scanning will be a future feature in gSender!
@NCNC My apologies for being so dense, Gustavo. I watched the video. It’s an interesting feature. There have been members here that have jury-rigged probes up to their Long Mills with some limited success. I am sure that you know that there are commercially-available probes, too. If you do go forward with something, please report back.
I have been interested in Estlcam ever since I first saw the video on surface scanning but I have always been scared off by the highlighted lines in your first picture.
I decided to dig a little and see what I could figure out. I first verified that the Arduino Uno uses the Atmega328. Then I went to this page on the LongBoard. That section of the docs has a picture of the pinout that the LongBoard uses for it’s Arduino Uno.
Then I compared this image with your second image. As far as I can tell the LongBoard uses the same pinout as Estlcam.
Before my digging I had no idea if the LongBoard could run Estlcam but now I think it would probably work. But am I confident enough to risk my LongBoard?
@NCNC@_Michael I don’t see anything in the DEHammer video to indicate that he exported the gcode from Estlcam and used gSender to control the Long Mill. It looks to me like he used Estlcam to control the Long Mill.
I just wrote to DEHammer to ask how he controlled the Long Mill. When/if he replies, I’ll post his reply here.
@_Michael That’s me asking the question. I had not gotten back to Youtube to see his reply. Tks, Michael. There is nothing in his video to show that he used gSender, so I though it was worth asking.
Yup, the Longboard is a bit expensive to try it out and risk damaging it.
I made my own CNC 20 years ago from scratch (electronic, electric and mechanical components, admittedly with more than a little external help as I’m no Electrical Engineer), with my own electronic circuit boards to connect to (a now Windows XP) computer’s parallel port and using KCam (software’s website now defunct) to control my machine, an electrostatic discharge (I presume) fried my E-Stop pins, so yeah, not risking doing something without more guidance.
