Convert grbl cnc controller to 32 bit

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.

You might want to use grblHAL to run grbl on a 32-bit processor.

If you are looking for a drop in replacement with great support, this is a nice alternative

1 Like

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).

1 Like

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 :wink:

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 :wink:
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… :smiling_face:

1 Like

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!