Hi all, let me preface that i am a total newbie here with vert limited experience with cnc, coding, etc. But i am learning so much thanks to people lke you who are willing to help!
So heres my dilemma. I recently picked up an older gweike g1 pretty cheap. Put it together and gave it a try. For those not familiar, it is equipped with a Smoothie Board 1.2. I dont want to purchase lightburn and have been using LaserGRBL in Smoothie compatibility. This process has been a little clunky and unreliable. The motions arent bad, but the laser and fan controls are not great. E.g. the m3/4 and M5 commands turn the blower on and off, not the laser. The only way to control the laser is with a G1 s.5 or similar command.
Also when rapid moving, the laser ignores the M5 and fires unless you preface with a G1 s0.
Sometimes it randomly ignores endstops and has to be reset, sometimers adjusting the laser power is ignores and runs 100% all the time. (I am using the commands at .1-1)
My thought is i would prefer to run grbl lpc on the board, or possibly just change boards to a grbl board.
Any thoughts or tips? Again, i dont want to invest a ton into this unit, it is a learning experience.
Welcome Carl,
I am going to presume you have read the documentation for the SmoothieBoard. It doesn’t work with LaserGRBL. You may need to get a different board, or find a different G-code driver program that works. Fusion360 has a post processor that operates smoothie-ware or so they say..
I know the board is meant to be used with lightburn, but the latest versions of GRBL have smoothie compatibility