I know very little when it comes to cnc and stuff. But i am wondering if and how to install GRBL onto a mega+ramps 1.4 board (all i have at the moment) so that i can run lightburn and a laser diode to do some projects.
Eventually i will be running a plasma cutter and using lightburn since i own the software, but would like to get my laser cnc built first. My CNC frame is an experiment of my own right now. I choose to get help here because i have been a member for a while and trust the input, as well as i have been making a MPCNC
You can run GRBL on your mega/ramps but there are issues. It is a ‘non-standard’ version of GRBL and it has some issues with pins floating during boot causing spurious laser firings!. You would be much better off in my opinion investing £12 in an uno/cnc shield combo. KISS principle works here!
Another alternative would be up-scaling to a ESP32 based board like the Jackpot from this site and run FluidNC but that will entail a learning curve.
Lightburn doesn’t care what firmware is running on your hardware, it just sends gcode.
Interesting, i have a couple of uno boards from that 30 days lost in space thing haha.
For some reason i thought thebmega was a 32bit board.
Im actually now going to get a cnc board that is 32 bit from amazon that runs grbl. Below is the one im thinking. i am going to have someone help purchase it and on return they get some cnc stuff
What part of the world are you in?
A $53 board from Amazon is nearly the same cost as a V1 Jackpot board, which is a radically superior platform for running CNC.
Im in the states, but ill send the link to the purchasers to buy the jackpot board. Thanks for the heads up.
Since it comes preloaded with firmware, will that work for any type of CNC table frame that I make? Because I’m currently making my own table frame just for learning and experimentation
Jackpot uses FluidNC (a next generation derivative of GRBL) , and supports machines with up to 6 Stepper motors (5 drivers come with the board). You’d have to try pretty hard to create a CNC router or laser machine that it cannot support.
Woot dang! Ok, cool. I will get this. Eventually my cnc will be used for a plasma cutter, but for right now, ill be using a wood router system.
I use ondsel engineering suite as my modeling software but no idea what to use as my cam software for cnc cutting? Will lightburn work with a wood router to cut?
Many of the community use Estlcam for that, some use other CAM.
I have a JL1 laser that I put a Jackpot on and use Lightburn to drive it.
LightBurn has a product that is in beta right now called MillMage, which you can think of as LightBurn for milling operations. It’s not released yet but many of us are pretty excited for it to arrive as we think it will really open up a new set of capabilities for both design and CAM.
ANY board you choose will need you to be very careful in considering the EMI from the HF start to not mess up the CNC controller. (In fact, you’ll need to use good practices even with a normal plasma cutter.)
We can help walk you through it, but in general it means thinking about shielding, filtering, and cable routing for everything in the system. Plenty of folks have built non HF plasma CNCs with the various controllers that run MPCNC/LR machines.
