I have a Shapeoko 3 XXL with a Raspberry Pi (with a touchscreen) hooked up to it for control. I use CarbideMotion for the Pi on it and it’s worked fine so far. But now I’m finding I have to use UGS for the J-Tech laser. When done I have to load in settings again for CarbideMotion, which also means re-initializing the Shapeoko and moving it back and setting zero again.
Is there a way to use UGS with the CM settings (and maybe edit settings in UGS accordingly)? Or is there another way to be able to move from the laser with UGS to CM without having to take the time for a full re-initialization?
Or is it possible to have CM read the GCode files for the laser and control it, so I use one program for both laser and end mill work?
You can’t switch back and forth between gcode senders (whichever they are) without reinitializing, because upon (re)connecting the sender will likely reset the controller.
Now, UGS is a generic G-code sender, I’m curious what specific settings you use there to run your laser jobs ? You may be able to run the same laser job gcode files from CM, the trick is that for laser job $32 should set to 1 (GRBL’s “laser mode” enabled, otherwise the movement will stop whenever GRBL receives a command to change the “RPM”/laser intensity). And $32 must be reset to $0 before running a CNC job again.
I honestly can’t remember if I ever actually tried using CM for laser jobs (since I use Lightburn for that), but my point is that if you can run it in UGS, you should be able to run it in CM. Just watch out for $32 value.
Downloaded it and put it on my Pi controlling my Shapeoko. gSender crashes whenever I run it. I’ve posted on their forum about it, with a crash report. I’ll see what I hear there.
Meanwhile, I’ll keep working with UGS to learn about how to use the laser and do all the things I want to do and figure when I finally can run gSender on my Pi, it’ll just make it that much easier to switch back and forth between laser and CNC.
