In the GRBL Chillipeppr workspace, the mm/inches often gets out of sync. Refreshing the CP gpage with F5 usually fixes it. Also, I do find that I need to restart my GRBL, SPJS, or re-login to Chilipeppr often to get everything working properly.
Is anyone else experiencing problems like this?
Yes, this happens on occasion in the TinyG workspace as well. What are you running SPJS on? How reliable is that machine? I’ve noticed that older hardware sometimes misses messages from Tiny G and Chilipeppr doesn’t update.
It is a Thinkpad laptop (~ 5 yrs old, Win XP). I usually run with the CP 3D updates at 5fps. A messaging architecture for machine control should really have guaranteed message delivery.
I guess that’s my feedback for the CP community. We should get messaging reliability and GUI sync nailed before adding more cool features, IMHO. Prove that browser based machine control can be “rock solid”!
@Matt_Wheeler I have been running on a pentium machine with Debian 8 and was experiencing issues on occasion. The issue is that certain hardware combinations are not made for “real time” work and they do not play nice with sending data back and forth. Your update frequency in Chilipeppr will have little effect on this, as that only lightens the load on your browser and your network. As well, make sure you have a good graphics card in the machine that is running Chilipeppr, I’ve found that having an underspec’d machine will cause things to appear as if they have not updated, when in fact, they have. I wish you good luck with your machine!
@Matt_Wheeler all communication from the browser to SPJS is guaranteed as there is a receipting system from the browser to SPJS. The browser will not send a 2nd command to SPJS unless it has received a confirmation from SPJS that the 1st command is processed. This was an original part of the implementation to ensure Gcode never gets sent out of order to SPJS or it would ruin everything.
So, I’m trying to understand better what you mean by out of sync? Maybe post a screenshot to help us debug? Keep in mind that Grbl does not push data to the browser when something changes like mm or inch. Grbl is a low-end CNC controller and you have to query it for everything. I don’t believe the Grbl workspace queries Grbl for inch or mm (although I’m really not sure).
I use the TinyG workspace all the time and things don’t get out of sync from my experience. If I sleep my laptop and it disconnects from SPJS, then I can get out of sync, but that’s because I disconnected. Is that possibly what you’ve seen?
When the “in/mm out of sync” thing occurs, I can click the units button and nothing happens. The state of the units fields in the jog component just displays mm no matter what the units actually are on the GRBL device. I have to jog the machine to see what GRBL thinks the units are.
At this point I always just hit F5 and it usually fixes the issue. Then units UI fields in CP do mirror the GRBL device again.
I’m seeing a couple of other situations where part or all of the CP UI locks up. But I’ll take those up in future posts.
It could definitely help to capture a quick screen recording. Do you think it is CP or Grbl? If CP, it’s possible that the author of the Grbl workspace is not aware of the locking up scenario. I don’t use that workspace, so I’m not sure. A refresh of the browser solving it does make it seem like it’s CP, not Grbl.
Funny! I just asked the same question. I often end up in MM inexplicably. Only reloading the page sometimes with the addition of clearing the cookies will fix it. Thanks for the F5 tip. I didn’t know about that.