Hi, I have been working on betters ways an techniques to align the spindle when going from file

General CNC CNC Routers
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Hi,

I have been working on betters ways an techniques to align the spindle when going from file to file, specially for PCBs where accuracy is very important. It occurred to me what I needed is a debugger like tool to allow me to control and adjust ShapeOko while running the program (GCODE) and even modify the GCODE itself; the same way I do for embedded programs and firmware. This tool also provides a platform to play whit visual alignment and OpenCV.

With nothing that I could find, I decided to create such a tool. For the past Month and 3 weeks I have been working on it. I think is ready for general use. Hope it will help others with their CNC alignment.

Note: OpenCV is not required unless you want to play with computer vision.

Note2: you only need gcs.py the rest is just the images sources, but they are embedded within the python scrip. So you only need the one file “gcs.py” and of course dependencies like python and wx.Python.

Use case: The GCODE file is a drill program for a PCB, gcs will make it possible to set-up a break point right before the tool plunge. At this point with the jogging controls it is possible to lower the tool right before penetrating the surface to verify alignment is adequate. Once this is verify and or adjusted, the program can continue.

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Its funny you did this. I just did this in tgFX for debugging gcode on tinyg.

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I Didn’t know about tgFX, Very cool. I see it works with TinyG will it work with Grbl? its impressive :wink:

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No grbl support. I started with this in mind. But TinyG just makes thing so much easier. We communicate all in json over serial via TinyG.
This is a status report:
{“r”:{“sr”:{“line”:0,“vel”:0.000,“mpox”:-10.000,“mpoy”:0.000,“mpoz”:0.000,“mpoa”:0.000,“coor”:1,“ofsa”:0.000,“ofsx”:0.000,“ofsy”:0.000,“ofsz”:0.000,“unit”:1,“homz”:0,“homy”:0,“homx”:0,“momo”:0},“f”:[1,0,10,290]}}

It’s all configurable too. But programming its much easier to not have to parse strings vs json objects.