@Timo_Birnschein I have found that PicSender is well worth the money to stream GRBL. It is rock solid and has a lot of features available. It can stream MB’s of data without a hitch.
The issue with both Nick’s and JTech’s GRBL is that in order to raster correctly, they had to forgo the Arc geometry which makes them awful at vector graphics and cutting. The nice thing about PicSender is that you can save your GRBL settings and reflash the Arduino so that you can use standard GRBL for cutting and laser GRBL for raster.
@Timo_Birnschein Be very careful with Nick Williams. See this post https://plus.google.com/107520953345127905250/posts/6CimCXby6tF
Jtech did not use his code as he claims. In fact here is some info from tests that PicEngrave did on his firmware.
"FYI, both me and John tested his new grbl Firmware with a raster gcode test file and it takes 1:55 where his older version takes 1:45. BUT, the release dates are the same. :-\ "
He does not have the best reputation in the laser community.
https://plus.google.com/107520953345127905250/posts/6CimCXby6tF
I just tried PicLaser & PicSender demo and I’m super impressed with the results my K40 can produce. I will consider buying the Pic software since it really seems to work quite well (even though the user interface is quite horrible…)
@Timo_Birnschein I agree on the horrible interface but their support is second to none.
@HalfNormal You mean the interface as well as the support is horrible?
@HalfNormal Regarding Nick Williams… hm… Not sure what to make of it… All I can say at this stage is that after porting his mods into my slightly modified master of grbl [0.9j.20160726] my laser works like a charm.
Now I need to figure out how to change the coordinate system in dxf2gcode because 0,0 is bottom left but the K40 has 0,0 at the top left. This mirrors all my cuts.
@Timo_Birnschein I just wanted to warn you because Nick has taken credit for other people’s work. If you are using laserweb to generate the gcode, I seem to remember a fix for the 0, 0 issue but do not remember where to find the answer. Check the laserweb github.
@Timo_Birnschein I knew it was there! Thanks Peter!
Here is the complete repository for the board as well as the grbl modifications on the current master 0.9j. It also implements Nick Williams planned realtime spindle control that I ported over from his repository. Using PicSender this grbl engraves like a charm at up to 50mm/s at a 45degree angle. I didn’t try much faster. At 100mm/s it stutters heavily so I didn’t push it any further than 50mm/s for stability.
+Peter van der Walt I saw that setting and I tried it visually but the point of origin didn’t change, only the image location… Let me check what the gCode looks like, maybe the origin is changed when I do that. Thanks!
@HalfNormal I found a little tool that I heavily modified yesterday: http://microforge.de/img2gco/
Try it for engraving and let me know. I produces very nice results on my K40!
https://github.com/McNugget6750/img2gco
http://microforge.de/img2gco/
@Timo_Birnschein I look forward to trying the software. I used it way back when but have not in awhile. Thanks for updating it to work with our systems. My K40 is down for some mods so it might be a few before I have a chance to try it out.
@HalfNormal Not sure what you are referencing as “Taken credit for other peoples work” If you could provide links it would be appreciated as I consider my reputation very important.
The main thing that I have provided to the community is the real time spindle control that Tim has ported over from my repository. I was the first to implement this on the grbl. To my knowledge the only other version used the z axis and some additional electronics. I have personally spoken with Jay at JTech laser and he is a really nice guy, It was he who indicated to me that his version was based of what we have done, this is what the open source community is all about. I am not sure Jay is on this form but I would hope if he sees this he would confirm my claims.
If you visit my repository you will see that it is over 2 years old.
https://github.com/nickw89509/LaserInk/tree/master/grbl_0.9.
I have continued to push the extremes of what can be done with the grbl firmware the current modifications will support a streaming mode that will send an entire raster line as a single GCode block the post that you reference above shows this. When released will provide a ten fold performance increase to what is currently possible with the grbl firmware.
FYI on arcs:
Our currently released version of the firmware does support arcs. The code base that I am using to implement the streaming mode does not only because of code space needed to implement the new streaming mode.
A note on arcs for both the smoothie and grbl firmware both must convert arcs into small lines on grbl this is a firmware setting not sure how it is controlled on the smoothie, but would expect it is part of the configuration. I have taken a different approach by doing this CPU intensive work when generating the GCode if you are using the object works software.
I am not angry, I would just like to know the origin of this information so that I can respond.
One other note if you look at the comment history
Which was a very popular post by the guys from PicEngrave and go back two years ago look for nickw89509. You will see that it is I who introduce them to using the spindle command to control the laser.