I don’t have access to a smoothieboard but we are trying to provide an awesome web-based controller for all types of controller board. It has awesome looking interface, real time visualization, webcam support, buffering, dual controls for multiple smoothieboards or smoothieboard and arduino, … Everything is free and open source of course
If we can get someone with a smoothieboard to give it a try and perhaps provide some feedback, it would be fantastic. With more users that have smoothieboard, I hope to add support for it in chilipeppr as well.
You can get support for it via the Google+ community called Chilipeppr.
You can start using the web-based controller simply by going to chilipeppr dot com.
The serial port, tinyglaser, and grbl workspaces appear to be compatible with Smoothie. The tinyg workspace seems kinda different.
May I recommend that you add links to the source somewhere on the site? Looking at the chilipeppr.com site it’s not actually apparent that it even is open source.
Hey Dat ~ I am awaiting the arrival of my X-Carve ~ (a week or so or anticipation to go) ~ I decided to go with the Azteeg X5 mini v1.1 (smoothieboard clone) ~ once I get set up and “running” (if the fates will allow) ~ I will be happy to test using Chilipeppr ~ it seems such a great app with an exceptional interface ~
An offline snapshot version of the app is here on Github, however it does not function yet. It is simply a cut/paste of the source code from the browser DOM after the browser has done all of the hard work to pull all JSFiddles inline. All external Javascript files would still need to be brought into the overall codebase like the Three.js files that are used by the 3D Viewer and Auto-Level widgets.
It will be up to the community to work up an offline version. Some suggestions would be to use the Charles Proxy to coerce your local browser into getting redirects to local files. Since ChiliPeppr is a very dynamic app with lots of features constantly being added, you would have to grab the latest snapshot and then watch your browser console window to see what external files it is requesting. Then go manually download those files to your local machine and register that URL inside of Charles to redirect to a local file. It’s a bit of work, but for those who really need an offline version that is a workable strategy.
Another idea would be to write a local script that downloads the main file and then pulls in all external files. This could be a decent amount of work though because you would have to parse the Javascript to find external files and then remap their download URLs inside the Javascript so they point to local resources. ChiliPeppr does use Require.js as the backing Javascript dependency system, so researching how Require.js works and looking at the code for the require.config{} objects could be a workable method
I attempted to use Chilipeppr with my smoothie this morning and it is connecting to the json server. Jogging works fine and I can type commands in the serial console and get responses as well as zero out and go to zero no problem. The problems I’m having is that it does not show the coordinates in the axes and when I play the gcode, the machine does not move. Am I missing something? I also tried to home the machine to the limit switches, but no response from my X-Carve.
John Lauer ~ main developer of Chilipeppr seems very accessible (Chilipeppr Google+ community) ~ he has responded readily to my inquiries and has expressed an interest in folks who are going the smoothieboard route for cnc control ~ he admits that is is rather unfamiliar with smoothieboard/ware but seems interested in some interaction with SB users so to possibly improve support for smoothieware boards for CNC with Chilipeppr~ so I suggest connecting with John and the community on Google+ and let’s start talking smoothieboard there.
John asked me why I would choose SmoothieBoard ~ as he is oft to recommend TinyG 2 ~ my response was that the Smoothieboard (and the Azteeg x5 mini which is what I have and intend to use on my soon to arrive X-Carve) offer more of what I am looking for a CNC to do ~ I am a designer of jewelry (in a manner of speaking) and so want smooth arcs, s-curves, micro steps etc… to carve fine detail organic 3D models (STL not CAD) ~ this is why Smoothieboards are favored more by the 3D printing community, I suppose ~ as the SB seems to be able to deal with larger, more detailed GCode with it’s connection and processor capabilities ~ I am still mostly in the research phase of all of this ~ but this is my impression thus far, and so this is why I set to the SB direction for my X-Carve.
Thus far (as we have only communicated briefly on the subject thus far) ~ John Lauer (Chilipeppr) ~ while admitting that he knows little about SmoothieBoard, affirms that the typical TinyG (or arduino etc…) set up is best suited for more hardsurface/CAD type models and that a more powerful controller with fast processor and fast and consistent communication (or SD card ~ which he stated is not often used by CNC folks, but is used by 3D printer folks ) would seem to be a requirement for handling the amount of GCode more organic 3D STL models would require.
