GSender, What do you think

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I have followed some posts re: GSender and am wondering what the benefits there might be for using it.

A quick look at it appears that it is somewhat easy to use. Just wanted some thoughts from users to see if I might want to play with it in earnest,

I have CC and CM currently. I am happy with the results I have gotten so far. Should I look into it and why?

Thanks

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When I looked at it the things I liked are:

  • less warning pop ups
  • everything is basically in one page, I find CM has to much jumping around on different tabs
  • way more keyboard shortcuts (user able to assign and change as well)
  • ability to jog at a diagonal
  • haven’t tried yet but there is an option to get the jog controls remotely on your phone so you don’t need to reach for the monitor/keyboard/mouse
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I switched to Gsender after trying a couple other senders. My primary reason was wanting to do manual machining. When I’m squaring up a block, or trimming edges a lot of times it’s much quicker to just turn on the spindle & use the jog controls to machine something. I couldn’t do this with CM.

It’s a pretty simple interface. Most everything you need is all on one page, so your not changing pages/tabs much.

There are a couple quirks I haven’t figured out yet. The Pause function just stops the spindle & feed.
I need a way to pause, lift, move, spindle off that returns to the last position when resuming.
I think it’s because the pause function uses feed-hold, which disables everything until you hit Start.
Rather than M5, M0/M1. Haven’t had time to solve that one, but I’m thinking it could all be part of the Resume function. Just need to figure out how to remember where it was before moving.

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I think like Slicers and other programs it’s good to take a tour of what you can use to control a machine. See what’s being developed out there. There are good things and could be better things. I like gSender because I came from a cncjs background. I do not like that it’s written in electron and can’t be made headless. But that could be said about many of these gcode/data feeders. :upside_down_face: I also find it good to have multiple drivers so if things get weird you can test it out in multiple places making debugging a bit easier too.

Anyhow. Explore the rainbow and all that.

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I’ve learned that the best gSender version is the last version before the “greatest” new version.

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Is flipping between CM and gSender as simple as starting whichever program you want or does it require reconfiguration each time you switch?

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CM used to do things to registers when it closed. I had to manually (via macro) reset stuff when I changed from CM to gSender. I haven’t used CM in so long that I don’t know what it does anymore. When changing to gSender, its best to heed Yoda’s advice, “Do or do not. There is no try.”

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Yea the machine doesn’t care. You’ll (re)home and be good to go. Motion and gSender are just programs that feed your machine which is grbl/gcode oriented. They do it differently, and Motion acts as its own translator–which can trick you from time to time, but at the end of the day they both just feed the machine.

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Will it allow me to use multiple tools? I am sure I can do multiple tool paths with the same tool.

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They’ve got a new tool change wizard but I still use Neil’s macros to handle tool changes. You can look at their forums for more information. If you have a vfd I don’t think their delayed start works as intended or it used to not so you need to add a dwell after you start the spindle. I think those are the only caveats I’ve found and in time those should go away.

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I too, am in the same boat and looking to switch from CM to Gsender. Mainly, just to have the ability to use a 3D Touch probe like @crpalmer recommended. Is there anyone on here using the 3D Touch probe from Amazon and still able to to use bitsetter? I don’t know the first thing about macros and how to write them, nor do I have time right now to learn lol. Do the probing functions in Gsender work for any probing tool?

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I can’t speak to the gSender probing, but the workflow that you want to accomplish to use a touch probe and use the bitsetter is fairly simple but I think would probably require macros. The jist of it is to figure out the difference between a surface you can probe with the touch probe (I used just left of the button on the S4Pro bitsetter) and the height that the bitsetter button triggers and then you can use the offset to probe either place and end up with the same height adjustment after doing the bitsetter / reference probe.

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