I like to call it the tinfoil hat solution
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First cuts with the 6-pack CNC controller and DRV-8825 drivers. micro steps is bumped up to 32 and the motors stay ice cold. Wiring was a snap and now my shapeoko is wifi without a pi. I’m grinding through some MDF right now as fast as I can go to see if I can generate some noise (router is on 6!) and so far so good!
Edit, typoed the driver. they are drv-8825
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This is pretty cool, so just to clarify is the 6-Pack controller connected to the Rpi CNC by cable? or is that where the WIFI comes in? does that mean if you have an issue with the Wifi that the machine will stop getting gcode?
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The esp32 controller has WiFi built in, and it can generate it’s own hotspot.
@scratch Please share more details on the new setup. Did you get any of the add-on modules?
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nope, no pi at all. the 6-pack uses an esp32 as it’s controller so it has built in wifi, bluetooth and it’s own web interface. I just upload gcode through it’s web UI to the built in SD card and cut from there.
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Right now I just have the optical isolated input module for the end stops and carbide3d probe. I’m ordering the high current relay to be able to control my spindle and dust collector. Tonight I tested with the router, dust collector and CNC all on the same power strip and didn’t have a single hiccup so I’m feeling pretty confident. I’ll have a page up soon on how to migrate to this controller on your S3 once I’ve tested it a bit more.
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I couldn’t find info on DRV-8125 drivers, did you mean 8825 ?
Does jogging sound similar to what it did before the upgrade?
gah, you are correct my bad. DRV-8825 are what I’m using and I’ll probably move to TMC-5160 soon. Jogging is significantly quieter than before. I had to adjust the steps per mm from 40 (s03 default) to 160 moving to 32 microsteps which leads me to believe the S03 runs at 8 using the DRV-8811 drivers built onto the board. I do need to mess with the driver current a bit. The motors are still ice cold at .7v vref but I skipped a step when I went full ham into some canary wood. I do a lot of 3d carving and one side effect I didn’t anticipate is that the machine overall seems to move smoother. I have 0 data to back that up so feel free to consider this “when I wash my car it drives better” level observations, but I used to get slow downs when I threw a lot of gcode into a small area (some of my gcode files are 40mb+). The extra CPU cycles going from a single 8bit core to dual cores and 240mhz seems to be just what the Dr ordered. More testing later today but overall I’m very happy.
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Rewiring gave the same effect, quieter movements, no whine and feels smoother. Steppers stay at approx 12 degrees above ambient temp.
Man I’d love to see this in action, onboard storage is a winner. how does jogging and zeroing work?
It’s pretty similar to CNCJS but obviously not as advanced. This is the webUI
The one thing it doesn’t have that I really miss is a realtime gcode visualizer. I didn’t realize how much I used that to keep me from making stupid mistakes. But the great thing about this setup is that you get both, I can use CNCJS if I want or I can just copy that same gcode to the SDCard over wifi and let it run self contained. I’ll see if I can get a video or two up today
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6-pack CNC worked well. This weekend I’m trying out the protoneer raspberry pi based solution. I’ve made an sdcard image that mounts the filesystem as readonly, starts cncjs at boot and puts any filesystem writes into RAM that gets tossed when the pi is rebooted so I should be able to treat it the same way as the 6pack controller and just power it on and off at will. I should have stepper drivers and a power supply by tomorrow and will start wiring it up.
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And here is the protoneer on a Pi 4. I 3d printed a case that fits the factory carbide motion case and has a magnetic top to cover everything. The USB port is what I use for my probe connector. I think this is the solution I’m going to stick with. The 6-Pack is amazing, but it’s large and leaves a lot of wires hanging off the side of my machine. The Protoneer tucks nicely into the factory spot and gives me cncjs etc.
Both solutions seemed to fix my reset issue so I suspect I just abused the hell out of my previous controller and it needed replacing.
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