I have a simple question. I’m currently running a laser with an arduino and a cnc shield using LaserWeb. What is the speed comparison between arduino and a smoothieboard. Is it much faster and is it worth the extra cost ?
I would say “YES” if your machine is capable.
The max speed is going to be mostly due to the combination of belt/pulley pitch, stepper motor max rpm, driver quality, max steps per second the microcontroller can output and microstep resolution.
Grbl running on a Arduino Uno can run fairly fast. Grbl can reliably output 30k steps/sec while smoothieware can do about 90k steps/sec.
I switched to using smoothie on a Cohesion3d mini for my laser for these reasons…
External Lcd panel
4th axis rotary capable
Easy configuration changes
Drop in upgrade for my k40 laser
Somewhat Better motion control vs grbl
And SPEED!!!..
My laser does 400mm/sec. The belt/pulley combination and using 16microstep trinamic drivers require 160 steps/mm movement
400*160 = 64k steps second. This is twice as fast what grbl on a Arduino Uno can do!!
If your steps/mm is much less, then you may not need greater than grbl 30k steps/sec max output. You may still want to upgrade for the other reasons I listed.