I forgot about my other experiment. FluidNC supports WebSocket connections. I’m not sure you can do everything through that type of connection, but you can do quite a bit. Check this out:
Note that you can’t use “https” because you can’t connect to a non-secure websocket over a secure connection. Don’t worry, this websocket connection is happening on your local network. Access to your CNC is not happening over the internet. It is just serving the web page.
http://cnctest.azurewebsites.net/
This is 100% external of the WebUI. It relies on the FluidNC functionality used by the WebUI. I connect using the WebSocket URL ws://192.168.0.240:81
192.168.0.240 is the IP of my machine and 81 is the websocket port. If you are set to the default fluidnc.local address, then ws://fluidnc.local:81 also works.
I can jog, see the position update in real time, send commands like $SS. This is just an experiment that I found interesting. Not sure how far I would go with this but it’s an interesting idea. Using a variation of my UI switching method earlier in this topic, you could switch between this and WebUI. You could host it somewhere inside your network, or on a Raspberry Pi or anything with an HTTP server. You could probably rig up a separate ESP32.