Autoleveller

James,

I've noticed on your twitter feed that your looking into GRBL and Autoleveller?
How is this even possible? I looked into this myself some time ago and come to the conclusion that GRBL would need a lot of modifying just to get a height probe working, let alone variables etc.

I'm rather intrigued by this!

By the way, I've given up with the machinekit and beaglebone black. Was too much faffing around. Even got some circuits made professionally, twice, and I'd made stupid mistakes on each one and was a lot of money down the pan so gave up.

Sorry for the late reply, I have been fiddling with that GRBL board (lots of problems and fixes so far, so it hasnt gone smooth at all). I hope its OK now after my last solder bridge clearing exercise. Need to wait for it to dry before I can check it because I left it soaking in ISA last night and its still damp.

Anyway, I am glad you asked that question as maybe you can stop me if I have missed something obvious...

Heres what I know... as of GRBL 0.9, there is probe pin available for the arduino as well as a probe gcode word to use it. However GRBL does not support variables or writing to a file for persisting the axis values.

I see no reason why I cannot write my own GRBL control software to interpret certain lines however to do this. Initially, this would be a a simple case of opening a file whenever a line such as: is encountered, which is what linuxcnc does now in fact. All the probing done after this line would be written to this txt file which could then be read and used by AL.

I could later support variables through this software without needing to modify the GRBL code itself. Later still I could write a full GRBL controller GUI.

I know the feeling with the BB. I once tried to modify an xbox controller and kept buying and messing up the boards. Eventually decided this was costing to much and gave up.