I just ordered a smoothieoard to drive my new CNC hotwire foam cutter. (And to use it later in a real CNC mil)
I know I won’t need a full blown CNC software like Mach3 because smoothie will run the Gcode for me.
But how is the workflow going to be? I would not want to interact with the serial console and paste gcode myself.
The frontend softwares mentioned on the front page seem all very 3d printer centric.
I really would not mind having he tool axis plotted during a cut and at least some manual control options for homing axis and such.
And if a four axis foam cutter is too excotic with it’sgeometry. How would normal CNC mils be driven with smoothie?
Imported from wikidot
Hm, looks like the tool world isn’t quite as barren as I thought. I forgot that smoothieboard is GRBL compatible.
I found grblfeeder. It’s not pretty but better than nothing.
I would still be interested in your replies.
You have many options. But as far as I know, nothing that will be as complete as what you get from the Mach3 interface ( live visualisation of the tool’s position/path etc ).
As you mentionned, the GRBL controllers should work ( though a few do stupid things that make them not work with Smoothie when they really should. Easy to fix if you can code though ).
I love Octoprint. It’s for 3D printers, but it’s pretty good for any machine.
Smoothie also has Ethernet support and it’s own ( simple ) web interface.
On my CNC mill I personally drag/drop the gcode file to the Smoothie, then using a serial terminal just type “play /sd/myfile.gcode”
Cheers 