Anyone knows how to set up a raspberry pi or pi2 so that i can have the touch screen and control the shapeoko 3 from it? i want to do my cad/cam work on my laptop, save the gcode file to a thumb drive, then use the touch screen to load and run the gcode from the usb drive so I can keep my laptop for other work while the shapeoko is running, also can mount it to my control box for the power supply and motor drivers and have a contained unit.
Have you considered using ChiliPepper and just sending it over your network? You can use a Pi, BeagleBone, or just about any micro computer to connect to your controller. It runs a small app in the background that ChiliPepper connects to and streams the gcode directly to it.
What size touchscreen?
Assuming the pi2 can run Java, you could use UGS.
Otherwise I don’t see why you can’t run the many other gcode sending utilities that exist for Linux.
I think the biggest challenge will be usability with regards to screen size, and fingers. You don’t want to accidentally press z vs x!
Don’t forget the pi2 can now be considered as a pretty good desktop cpu. Add a keyboard, mouse, and hdmi monitor and you will ready to go
I agree with Carl. Do your work on your laptop and skip the transferring step. Just hook the machine up to a pi and run the SPJS on it, then you can send the gcode directly from any computer to your machine using ChiliPeppr.
@Carl_Fisher Can you point to where I can find a pre-configured RPi SD card image of ChilliPeppr? Having just received my RPi 2B I’d love to give it a try as a dedicated cad/cam workstation.
DOH! How did you get a 2 B already? I’ve been watching the various outlets and they’re all still back ordered.
You can run any image Raspbian or whatever.Then go to ChiliPepper workspace for your controller and there is a section to download the SPJS applet. You just need to pull it down and set it up to automatically launch on boot. That’s it.
Just to clarify, the beauty of ChiliPeppr is that it is a web application. So, you can run it from anywhere and almost any machine. It will take more resources than the small serial port json server that is needed to talk to the machine, but if you wanted to run a web browser for ChiliPeppr and the SPJS on the same Pi, you could try it. I’m not sure if the browser support would be there for the inlcuded browser in Raspian though… I think most folks use google chrome.
Adafriut is your best bet for products and tutorials on RPi touchscreens. Here is one link.
Im gonna be taking my shapeoko on the road to make custom signs, So I wont always have internet access to use chili pepper. So I need a stand alone setup, and like I said don’t want my laptop tied up while using my shapeoko.
@Frank_Graffagnino It’s been the obstacle of successfully installing the JSON server that has kept me from trying Chillipeppr in the past.
i thought about a keyboard and mouse vs a touch screen, but i want as small of a foot print as possible for transportation.
If you do go the keyboard/mouse route, i’m using a keyboard with a built in touch pad so it’s easy to tuck away and you don’t have to worry about a surface to mouse on. Also it’s a small chicklet style keybaord without the number pad, so it’s pretty compact.
I would start with a raspberry pi and use the basic rasping image nothing special. If you don’t want to go the chillipepper route use the Java base gcode sender and do remote control from your lap to start it up. Let me know if you want more details on how to do this.