Hi, I have a small cnc laser running grbl 1.1. It is currently 8 bit but I would like to convert it to 32 bit. The board is in the link below:
Board
Is it my understanding that I can unplug the 8 bit card and replace it with a 32bit version, essentially the stm32 variant ‘blue pill’, or even the black variety?
I would of course then want to load it with grbl which I understand is possible.
Am I being over simplistic about this?
if so please could you offer guidance?
many thanks.
If you are looking for a drop in replacement with great support, this is a nice alternative
I very much doubt that, the blue pill is not pin compatible with Arduino Nano, plus it is a 3.3V CPU instead of 5V. At least it would not be a simple plugin, you may be able to wire it with jumpers or an adapter board, possibly with some voltage level conversion. I would need to see a schematic for the Cronos board.
AFAICT, going 32 bit on a budget may require some effort, either on the hardware side or software side. I haven’t seen many off the shelf CNC boards with a prebuilt 32 bit grbl binary, one example is here GRBL GRBL32 3-Axis CNC Controller F13 – 250KHz – Tom's Robotics, with a little DIY there is a range of ESP32 based boards Hardware · bdring/Grbl_Esp32 Wiki · GitHub (none of which seem to be in stock).
Hi Michael and thanks for the reply. I am also looking at putting grbl on a 32bit smoothieboard, the MKS Sbase v1.3.
On GitHub there is a grbl release for this board but it is in the grblLPC. Is this the same thing?
Regards, laurence
Nice piece of kit but for my purposes and intentions too expensive
Shame about the plugnplay bit. Yes I’ve seen GRBL32 on Tom’s Robotics, nice but again not feasible financially.
DIY boards? For a microcontroller designer/programmer I make a great painter and decorator
Regards, Laurence
No, that’s @cprezzi’s earlier port of grbl to LPC. It’s stable and respected. You won’t go wrong choosing it.
I think but don’t know that grblHAL can support a wider range of LPC-based boards that don’t have the same pin mappings as the smoothieboard. It’s also where a lot of new development expanding grbl is happening, so you might find that it supports additional features that you would like to be able to use. I haven’t looked deeply into it but have been thinking of trying it out myself…
Okay thank you I’ll look into it. To be honest I know next to nothing about grbl, and despite having higher qualifications in IT this is a whole new world to me!