It seems to me that +Peter van der Walt @Andrew_Hodel and @jlauer all have some cutting edge products that work with GRBL. Chili Peppr, which has fantastic expandability, is described as working with the TinyG controller. This is a great controller that has motor drivers on board, but can also be used with external motor drivers by-passing the internal ones through pins on the board. This then does away with the argument of high Amp Motors with lower amp drivers. But the TinyG is not a computer like the RaspberryPi. +Peter van der Walt GRBLPI CNC Controler shield interfaces with a Raspberry Pi and allows external motor drivers to be used directly (none on the board). This is coupled with @Andrew_Hodel GRBLWeb controls, which also has add-ons available for it…
I am a bit confused by all this as there seems to be an overlap. Can you guys explain if the ChiliPeppr Controls can be used with the GRBLPi CNC Controller OR GRBLWeb Controls be used with TinyG and what are the advantages to each.
There are a number of other new developments that, depending what is learned from the question posed, could lead to a super control package for the end user.
+Peter van der Walt Thank you for enlightening me on some future plans and some of the advantages. I have been following your posts not only here, but on other communities and Open Builds and like what I see coming. By no means did I intend to omit +Todd Fleming since it was reported here that his JSCut works with both ChiliPeppr and GRBLWeb.
I saw the frames you designed but unfortunately it was after I already ordered parts from Open Builds. That is how I became aware of your work while looking for controls to use with my Open Builds CNC. Unfortunately, I am still waiting for the parts to come. It takes two to three months to go through Philippine customs so I should be getting them in a week or two. While waiting I have come up with a couple of other projects that I am compiling Bills of Material for and looking for sourcing. Thanks again for the insight.
I would love to see chilipepper or grblweb as a front end to linuxcnc/machinekit on beaglebone black. Anyone tried to make that connection?
I think grblweb can be reimplemented in chilipeppr by simply removing some components. Once you start down the path of Web based controller (or any modern controller) you will soon find chilipeppr the best of them all.
+Peter van der Walt I am confused about why your grbl pi+ board is better than a beagle bone / pi board connected to a tinyg/grbl driver. We all need some computer to talk to a serial port on a driver board that control the electronics. And for 135 tinyg is very cheap since it has 6 axes and a bunch of other features.
@Brad_Hopper wouldn’t chilipeppr simply replace Linux cnc? The beagle bone black will just run the json server to talk to chilipeppr front end. Then anywhere you have a browser, you have a full fledged cnc controller.
I don’t know. Machinekit is a response if linuxCNC to run on BBB which uses the powerful PRUs for high speed step gen. Today it has old clunky front ends like Axis but there’s Machine talk, an API for interfacing with lcnc guts. Sounds like chillipepper does all of the above though?
+Peter van der Walt, oh yes I agree, having one board that drop in is awesome. I have been “stalking” your progress on it since. Rpi has support for a decent Web cam. Killer feature potential.
@Brad_Hopper , can you help me a bit to understand better your current tool chain? You run Linuxcnc to send gcode to machine kit? What is a PRU?
Machinekit is linuxcnc guts respun for BBB. PRU are two dedicated 200mhz controllers for high speed real time operation, in this case used for stepgen. The PRUs are onboard the BBB so its already an all in one, minus the actual motor drivers. For that there is cramps a ramps derivative as BBB cape. Axis is one of many front ends built into lincnc but its old and except via x not remote.
Ok. I think I might be getting a gist of what all these terms mean.
I think what we need a super-gut version of machinekit. Currently, Chilipeppr needs a SerialJsonServer running so the front end can talk to it. Any functionalities that requires real-time responses (~5ms) will need to be at this layer and is on the BBB/Rpi+. Then Chilipeppr can talk to BareBoneMachineKit and utilize all the toolchain we have.
There is MachineTalk that suppose to provide modern JS access to these machine components but I don’t know yet how that would pan out since they have no code link on their site. Their idea seems to be right. Once they have something decent, we can take the current chilipeppr and put it as a middle layer to control machinery.
@Brad_Hopper +Peter van der Walt if you two have not already, consider joining the Chilipeppr community here on Google+. Inputs from hardware experts and pro-users will allow software packages to move forward in the right direction. Otherwise, we will all have simply a bigger and more glorified AXIS interface. 
The goal with ChiliPeppr was to create an operating system for CNC control. I had a huge need for an Auto-Leveller, laser control, and Arduino control simultaneously while controlling my CNC. No app out there seemed to solve my needs. So, ChiliPeppr, at its core was designed to enable gluing together all of the extended pieces you would do around a CNC controller.
Here are some of the core design principles that make ChiliPeppr really unique and exciting:
- The extensibility documentation is part of the UI in the PubSub Viewer (upper right corner of each widget).
- You can create your own workspace by forking somebody else’s
- You can write macros directly in the UI
- PubSub is a very easy way for others to feel comfortable interacting with other people’s widgets
- Every widget can be viewed/forked directly in JSFiddle with a single-click
In terms of your earlier question on some of the overlap ChiliPeppr may have, I do think ChiliPeppr is taking the approach that it’s a full app in the cloud and the only thing local should be a Serial Port JSON Server. The benefit of this model is that it should be really easy for the Serial Port JSON Server to run on every platform now and in the future and then let you always have your fancy-dancy control UI on a powerful machine like your laptop.
However, I do know several folks are still craving an offline version of ChiliPeppr. I feel like that’s a step backwards, but they may have different goals. I think being offline you lose being “part of the cloud.”
@Brad_Hopper I don’t think this would be that hard. Because ChiliPeppr took the approach of decoupling the direct CNC commands from the UI, you could just call linuxcnc/machinkit’s API calls that are equivalent to Serial Port JSON Server’s.
You would need:
- API call to send a Gcode line
- API call to send back a response.
- Just fork the TinyG or Grbl widget and tweak the controller specific differences.
My guess would be you don’t need connect to your CNC from the Serial Port Widget anymore, but rather from the LinuxCNC/Machinekit widget. However, I would leave the serial port widget in the workspace for those that want to glue together Arduino commands while sending simultaneously to their CNC.
I’m going for lean and efficient without external dependencies with GRBLweb. Something simple that works which others can hack on.
Thanks for the post.
I looked at grblweb. It certainly has the charm of being barebone. It has dependency too and you have to install the server on your own. I doubt you can ever get around that.
@Dat_Chu there’s an rPi image here that you can flash to an SD card - http://xyzbots.com/2014-07-15-grblweb-wheezy-raspbian.img
It’s on the site http://andrewhodel.github.io/grblweb/ and linked/talked about on the README.
Sounds good. Binary for chilipeppr serial server is also one click away for me. I am a supporter of modern js pubsub with webgl. I think chilipeppr is the way to go. Both programs are useful. I think something awesome would be to implement grblweb minimalistic approach on chilipeppr as a grblSimple workspace. This will allow more new comers to get started and still retain the beautifully-simple philosophy of grblweb.
I think Grblweb is awesome and that Andrew has done a spectacular job with it. A lot of people love it and it’s highly useful. Its really up to the user and the right tool for the problem the user is trying to solve.
Hah. You are in luck, I have created a new workspace in chilipeppr called grblLaser. 
You check it out and let me know what you think
@Brad_Hopper I’m downloading the BBB Debian image now (2014-5-14), I’ll work on an image that has GRBLweb if you can test it for me. I don’t have a BBB but I can build the image.
Edit* had to order one to build the npm modules, should have something on Wednesday but if someone has one I can ssh into I can have it sooner.
Wow… that was fast. I’ll have to hook up my BBB/CRAMPS and see if I can work it now I had two dead AVR boards and while I was soldering my CRAMPS a Smoothie firmware compatible board came in and I’ve been using that mostly.
@Edmund_Betlinski regarding GRBLweb and TinyG support…
GRBLweb keeps it simple, what you type into the cmd window goes directly to the serial port. It functions perfectly with TinyG and any other serial based controller.
I’m also working on a 3d printer version, perhaps MARLINweb that embeds Slic3r to have a full stl->print toolkit in a single rPi image, web based.
Always willing to work with other devs if people are interested to help.