Can you flash firmware via USB with that?
I’m sure it works fine but the WLED discord seems not fond of that brand but like you said with a small number of LEDs, it probably doesn’t matter.
I was also looking at this similar one which can be flashed via USB.
I seem to be headed down that same path.
We might be getting enough snow tomorrow where I would need/want my snowblower. So, that was motivation to finish getting that ready. This means I had my propane heater going in my garage which meant it was warm enough for me to play with LEDs some more.
It’s a little hard to see but it tracks the position fairly well. It’s a bit off at high feedrates. Not sure if I want to play with the reporting rate or offset based on feedrate. I do plan on changing the config for the position width to be number of LEDs instead of mm.
That’s about as far as I plan on going with this for now. At least until I talk my wife into letting me make that wall mounted pen plotter and put it in the house. That’s a work in progress.
Dang that is cool!
So if you jog in Y it still happens right, the light just stays in one place? I am making super slow progress on my full sheeter, that thing is going to need some lights for sure. I can’t wait to try this.
Yep, it’s only looking at the X position.
If anyone wants to try this, I pushed up my changes to the usermod-fluidnc branch in my fork. I’m sure I’ll be making some tweaks, but it’s functional.
If you’ve never played with WLED before, you should probably try it out with a standard build before going down this path. There’s a lot to WLED but it’s super fun.
If you’ve compiled FluidNC yourself before, this works the same way using PlatformIO. There are some extra steps for the web portion (like installing Node JS). More details are here:
https://kno.wled.ge/advanced/compiling-wled/
I just added a platform_override.ini file with these contents:
[platformio]
default_envs = esp32dev_fluidnc
[env:esp32dev_fluidnc]
extends = env:esp32dev
build_unflags = ${common.build_unflags}
build_flags = ${common.build_flags} ${esp32.build_flags} -D WLED_RELEASE_NAME=\"ESP32_FluidNC\"
${esp32.AR_build_flags}
-D USERMOD_FLUIDNC
I’m not entirely sure how to apply this otherwise yet. This is on the latest unreleased 0.16 version. If anyone has suggestions, I can try it. This is why I’m hoping to get this added to the official codebase at some point so this can be simplified a bit. I can provide firmware builds if that helps, but I’m not sure what to do with them.
Once it’s installed and WLED is running, you’ll need to set the rest up. I’m certain I’m missing parts here. WLED is super configurable but that means there’s a bit to setup.
In the WLED app, under Config menu:
Update the settings to connect to the same network as FluidNC.
Under Hardware setup, setup your strip with the appropriate settings and number of LEDs. These values will differ depending on the controller and strip you are using.
Create presets with the following IDs for each state. You can play around with what effect you like. I have some crazy effects right now, because I can.
Note that if the effects are moving in the wrong direction (like if the effect moves in the opposite direction when homing X), you can check the “Reverse direction” checkbox in the Segment configuration.
If anyone has any questions or suggestions, let me know.
How cool, great job. Hope this get rolled into standard wled somehow
Once I’m confident there are no issues and I’m not tweaking, I’ll submit a PR and see what happens. That will be a bit though. Since it’s a usermod, it will still require a custom compile but they have tools for doing that on a website.
I’m sure this is an incredibly dumb GitHub question. When I clone that repository, I don’t get the FluidNC usermod in the appropriate folder. When I download the ZIP I do get the user mod. Am I doing something wrong with the clone?
When you clone a repo, it’s probably checking out the main branch by default. You likely just need to checkout the usermod-fluidnc branch.
Thanks very much. It was indeed the case. I found a way to checkout the right branch. However, now I don’t have a html_ui.h in wled00 so I’m failing. Apparently it’s related to the wled_server.cpp.
Might need to come back to it tomorrow. This work is super cool. Thanks for sharing.
I figured this one out, and it may be a Mac thing. I had just updated Node.js for a separate project. But I needed to run npm install inside the terminal of VSCode. My guess is the path wasn’t there for my repo.
Thank you so much for sharing this! I got it working today on my machine, with our home-engineered controller and my SK6812s. Its awesome.
I did get the follow working, but it doesn’t track perfectly. I suspect it’s due to my haphazard cut LED strip. Although I did end up with a CNC X Position Offset Mm of -170 to have the lights anywhere near the bottom of the core.
I’ll do a more careful install when I have my permanent strut cut (finally). But I just wanted to thank you for sharing all this work.
Adding a reminder to myself to update my usermod to support the latest WLED changes.
I hope to mess with this again soon.