After watching this vid from 2 weeks ago (it’s July 8, 2025) by Sienci Labs about their FREE sender, I was eager to try it out.
It is compatible with all grbl machines AND grblHAL! UGS was nice, but not grblHAL-compatible and did not play well with my home-made pendant. Gsender does, no problem. My only complaints so far is that it won’t run on my old Lenovo T450, and the screen needs more vertical pixels than I have, so some scrolling is needed at times.
It does look very nice. I just looked, GrblHal does have esp32 support, are you going to try this instead of fluidnc on ryans board?
I’m using a Teensy 4.1 on a Phil Barrett board, but I am about to migrate my Portable Primo to a Bart Dring ESP32 one because I want to add a rotary axis and Phil’s only has 5 axes.
This looks like it has all the features that Estlcam also has when used as a controller and a few more. Pretty neat. I might have to buy a second Addon board for my OpenCNCShield to switch between Estlcam and GSender with the flick of a button. 
Going to watch this thread! anyone got pocorn with movie theatre butter??
If you made a dollar for every time you mentioned Estlcam as a controller… haha
Christian would go broke, then everyone would be sad.
This looks really nice. I’ve downloaded the Pi version… same Pi4 I had UGS on, and that kept inexplicably disconnecting USB from the controller late in lengthy engraving jobs. I’ll have to see whether it was UGS or an over-temp Pi4 that was at fault.
I’ve also got a light-weight Asus laptop that is running Linux Mint Cinnamon… installed gSender and will check out whether I can complete jobs with it… without the USB disconnects.
A couple of things initially:
I look forward to playing with this in the coming days.
– David
Yeah, I am a fanboy. And I am just like: okay Scienci, it does look great, but what’s actually new about it? 
The stats page is cool, I’ll admit that.
One thing new is the idea of a combined system of settings, both firmware settings and sender settings, with a modern gui.
How is that new?
Thanks for this, Steve! This looks really good and has simple features which I was really getting frustrated about! I’ll give it a whirl!
I was using the sender coded by the guy who invented grblHAL, Terje Io. (HAL is a hardware abstraction layer, which allows grbl to be easily ported to any new processor hardware that comes along.) This sender, IOsender, worked well most of the time but the UI was way behind the times, and settings are organised in several places. It took me ages to find where to set up probing.
So it’s new for this branch of firmware. Really contemplating buying a grbl board for my CNCShield to switch between the senders. 
If you are curious about grblHAL, here is the wiki on github.
My board only supports a grbl board, but those PrintNC guys all use the grlbhal thingy.
So is this an option on a jackpot + something else via serial USB?
I believe it can work with any grbl-based controller, USB or ethernet connection. Can someone out there try it with their Jackpot and tell us how it is? I think the Jackpot is a variant of Dring’s ESP32 boards, and I will be using the FluidNC 6x V1.2 as soon as I get some more stepper drivers…
I have available Jackpot (and soon next-generation design) boards in a test setup. I’ll need some study time/help with grblHAL to understand what is needed to setup/use the system.
Jackpot is in the same ecosystem of board designs as Bart’s other boards, and it can be considered a sibling of these boards. It uses the same hardware-accelerated shift register system for IO expansion, with just a few changes to specific pin assignments on the ESP-32.
I’m running it on my Lowrider 3 with the SKR Pro, and gSender works an absolute dream on it.
Had to flash the SKR over to GRBLHal, which meant moving the probe and a couple of endstop pins around, but that in the end was super easy, once I stopped trying to force GRBLHal to work with the stock setup of pins, and changed the hardware to match GRBLHal instead.
I tried the install on a Pi4, which worked but wasn’t all that responsive, so once I got all the settings configured, I saved the settings and moved gSender over to a desktop PC that I had spare, with a touchscreen monitor.
It’s amazing. the jogging using the touchscreen in gSender versus moving via the original SKR Pro touchscreen is night and day, and the assistant tools for squaring, surfacing etc is just so easy.
I really recommend it as a system, for something that is free, its slick as heck.