Glitches? Update Recommendations...?

[Julien]

@mharper90

so I’m very curious now

I’m curious too, and I’ll do my best to support that investigation by doing more testing on my machine. It is quite possible that it only occurs for a specific workflow and we are doing things ever so slightly differently.

@mharper90

Which reminds me, that I only see this phenomenon when I want to force home the machine, so I cycle power to just the Shapeoko, leaving the VFD running

Ah, then it’s definitely possible that the PWM glitches during that power cycle of the whole Shapeoko controller. As Neil said it could quite possibly be fixed with a simple pull-down resistor…at the VFD input. That’s something we could explore, I could check how my controller+VFD behaves in that scenario.

@mharper90

Which also reminds me, I’d love to see a feature in CM that allows reinitializing without cycling power. Sometimes I know that I’ve possibly lost a step and want to get back to a known position before continuing, so I end up cycling power

You can force re-homing manually at any time by sending $H to the machine using the MDI tab.
BUT, I have not done that for a long time using CM, I can’t remember if it will behave the same as clicking the “Initialize machine” button, i.e. home AND probe BitSetter. It will re-home for sure.

@mharper90

Do you have a quick way to share macros or a rundown of what I would need to get CNCJS rolling?

First of all let me state that I’m not advocating for you to move away from CM, just that this is a possibility to get more custom behaviors. Actually I’m a little torn between those two senders myself
Anyway, setting up and using CNCjs goes like this:

• download the CNCjs standalone app installer for Windows or Mac. It’s just easier than going the “CNCjs embedded in a Raspberry Pi accessed remotely” (even though I have done that and it works fine too, just a bit more geeky).
• spend 5 minutes in the CNCjs Settings pane to disable the widgets that are not useful (CNCjs is very generic, can be used to drive 3D printers, etc…). I can make a list of the few mandatory widgets to keep, to clean-up the UI (from memory it’s basically the connect pane, GRBL console, G-code pane, Macro pane, disable everything else)
• download @neilferreri’s fantastic set of CNCjs macros, which will give you the ability to use the BitZero probe, and the BitSetter (and more)
• then the rest is pretty intuitive: home the machine, jog using the panel on the right, set/reset zeroes there, load a G-code file, run.

The one grudge I have is that CNCjs does not natively implement smooth jogging, but that’s not such a big deal (and it’s doable with a little geekyness again).