My journey of switching from Onefinity/Buildbotics Controller to gSender + SLB

Add-ons & Modifications 🧰 CNC Setup
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I’m creating a post to document my switch as reference for my future self and for others in case they also go this route.

Things I’m looking for the migration:

  • Headless setup. I will use Raspeberry Pi 4 or 5. I prefer remote access.
  • Able to support RapidChange ATC
  • Able to support my Automatic Dust Boot that I created.
  • Much quieter stepper controller. The motors buzz a lot on idle in 1F controller.
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Progress for headless setup:

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Great thread to start!

For RapidChange support, to my knowledge so far this is roughly where they’re at since I last spoke with their team - though into the future we’re hoping to make it so gSender doesn’t pause during tool change (optional) as well as integrate it more deeply into firmware

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I’m still waiting for my SLB to arrive. I wish I could get the SLB-Ex that you used for the AltMill or maybe an SLB that’s 36V capable.

In the meantime, I forked the gSender code and was looking through it. It looks like a simple change to add a conditional statement and a configurable option to disable tool confirmation.

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Once I get my machine running, I’ll focus on the software side and maybe submit a pull request to your base code. I’m actually working closely with Don. He gave me a good offer on the ATC, and I’ve been helping him in my free time.

I’m also kind of interested in starting to learn grblHAL. It seems like it would be better to implement this there instead of the more limited GRBL gcode. I told him, based on his video, there might be a better way to handle tool changes without uploading a gcode file.

I saw your repo for it: GitHub - Sienci-Labs/sienciHAL: Fork of grblHAL to make our own SLB firmware

I’m a software engineer by profession but still need to learn the programming language for this.

I know you guys are pretty swamp with all this development so I will just do whatever I can do to help. :smiley: . I really like what you guys are doing on both the hardware and software side.

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Here’s by the way the AutoDustBoot I created so it can work with RapidChange ATC cause I hate cleaning mess. :smiley:

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Ah cool I’ve seen this! I shared it around the office since I thought it was pretty slick. By all means if you’ve got a background in this stuff feel free to contribute - it seems like we’re always slammed and ultimately are doing this to help further the community to so any contributions are welcomed

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Adding hall-effect limit sensors. Stall homing will no longer working and it’s not that accurate anyway which is really needed for the ATC repeatability.

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Here’s the 3D mount I created:

And the hall-effect limit switches:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MZYYCLH?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title