GRBL and TFT screens (and some WiFi too)

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@Strider_Matic

one because I had it laying around and I’m a little bit lazy

Good enough reason for me XD. I was just curious.

[Strider_Matic (Tim O.)]

I had tried them in series on a 3D printer project and I was getting poor results.

More Motors?

So last night I was trying to get this working by taking a page from the MPCNC playbook and wiring the motors in series. I ended up having a bunch of problems with skipping. Well tonight, with a clearer head, I tried it without the belt even attached and they are just a mess. Same skipping and studdering I thought was being caused by tension or not being synced. Apparently the motors I have don’t play nice wired in series. Once I wired them parallel, everything evened out nicely. Here’s some pic…

[AlanFR (Alan F Ryden)]

Hello everyone, I have the MKS TFT32 and MKS DLC which I am hoping to use with GRBL on a small lathe (Unimat 3) I am converting to CNC. I have it hooked up with CNC/GRBL software and it seems to work OK so far. BUT I cannot work out how you get all custom buttons. I could only get 3 custom buttons to work (oddly these are located in settings), the software implies 4 but if you set to 4 then no buttons appear! The MoreFunction buttons do not seem to appear anywhere; software implies you can set up to 5. Can anyone give any guidance on this??
Finally the actual grbl interface seems odd. I have not really tested it out but it gives option of ‘borders’ or ‘figures’ (WTF) before ‘carving’ and uses odd spellings and terms. Sadly the firmware is compiled using Keil which costs thousands of $ so no good for hobbyist. Plus firmware difficult to follow anyway (the BTT TFT35 on the other hand is compiled on PlatformIO which is free and the BTT firmware is fairly easy to work out and mod; however I am unsure how to mod the comms to switch from Marlin to GRBL).
That said the MKS TFT and DLC make for a very inexpensive offline controller. I have added the WIFI and this does allow one to use a phone with the MKS App but as that is really only set up for 3D printers it is not really usable.

[truglodite (Kev)]

Hmm, what kind of grbl are you using? The dlc board looks like an integrated uno+Cnc shield, but not sure if the pin definitions would be are identical. Regardless, I would probably start with the latest grbl 1.1 release, and go from there… it can be compiled with the latest arduino ide so no Keil required.

Regarding customizing the tft firmware for grbl… that would be nice if someone got around to porting it for grbl. However I think the general consensus for now is that tft senders are kinda useless for grbl cnc. They can be useful for starting and stopping gcode maybe, but you will want a more full featured sender to get actual work done with (like estlcam, UGS, bCNC, Linux Cnc, or whatever are decent option… but one well suited for a lathe not 100% sure on that one).

[AlanFR (Alan F Ryden)]

Sorry, only recently noted your reply! I am using a version of Grbl 1.1 (Grbl-L for lathes). You are right about the DLC and it certainly seems to work so far (only now about to test probing function). My real problem was the MKS TFT which was supposed to have Grbl function. It does (sort of) but is really more meant for laser cutters I think. I have now unplugged the MKS TFT and instead connected an HC06 bluetooth module to the serial port on the DLC. So now I can connect it via bluetooth to my PC when testing or to a phone/tablet runnng grbl controller. Seems like a reasonable solution for now and I can use some redundant ‘family owned’ phones. In time I want to try out grbl on an ESP32 (or FluidNC as it seems to now be called).