Just wanted to let everyone know about some new features that have been added in the last few months. Wolfmanjm has been busy it seems…still a lot of documenting to do but the features are there.
For those who would like to follow along in the development there is this wiki which has links to the new and work in progress features that have been added.
First I will start with the WIP.
Feed Hold: “Feed hold and cycle start, ! and ~ causes instant pause (with some deceleration to avoid step loss)”
This has been a long time complaint from users. The buffer needs to drain in order to pause/restart. Due to the block format this was a difficult thing to achieve. My understanding is it was achieved by slowing the stepticker.
Second, still WIP, is backlash compensation. There was some testing of this by Wolfmanjm on his machines but it is still listed as a WIP. It is something that needs to be tested and verified more so currently as of writing this is only in V1 Smoothie.
Next are a few things that were added to V2 and possibly unknown to users.
-UART targeting: You can now configure UART 0/1 as “targets” instead of “console”. When configured this way you can send messages directly out the UART with “echo -1 hello world” will send “hello world” to the configured UART. This allows the connection of devices for send/receive via UART which are normally not easy to send messages to traditionally. e.g. Using a RS232 transceiver connected to the UART to communicate with different machines or inputs.
These commands can be put in the gcode string with pauses to do different things. I used this feature heavily when hacking my PnP to use Siemens feeders
-ED line editor: “This implements the very old ecce line editor to allow simple editing of text files (like config.ini). This editor is really quirky I’d prefer a better editor, but this was the only one that I could find that did not try to read the entire file into memory which would be a problem. Type %h to get help, %c saves the file to the specified outfile. As you have to specify the input file and output file you will need to delete the original file with rm and then rename the new file using mv (once you are happy the editing session was successful).” "You can move forward lines with m and back with m-1 (but only so far) The manual can be found here https://history.dcs.ed.ac.uk/archive/apps/ecce/hmd/ldsecce.html "
-Network: The network is much more stable now than in V1 and uses a proper TCP stack.
- A full FTP server is included which works well with filezilla and most ftp clients.
- The web server now supports websockets and uses them to talk to the smoothieboard.
- There is also an NTP client to set the realtime clock from a time server.
- A semi-telnet Shell is also enabled
-MAX7219 driver support: DRO support for 7 segment LEDS using MAX7219 drivers, make a display that can show current XYZ (ABC) positions on nice big led displays. Two connection modes are supported. cascaded modules or a cs per module.
-Subroutine support: Subroutines like Linuxcnc o commands
- o xxx sub - to create a subroutine
- o xxx call - to execute a subroutine
-MPG direct control of axis: It is now possible to connect an MPG directly to the Smoothieboard but also have separate pushbuttons to enable specific axis control. So a single MPG can be shared between multiple axes via pushbutton select.
For more info on these features (and any more that may be coming) follow this link
If you are interested in how to config these features and see what they can do there are sample configs here. For those who have used Smoothie in the past it should be fairly straightforward. Be sure to browse all the config samples (especially lathe) to see the places to add to your config.
We plan on doing more documenting on this but Wolfmanjm has been adding things faster than we can test/demonstrate them.
If anyone has any machines that these features have been or will be added to any and all writeups and videos are much appreciated. Opensource has always relied on community support. We are no exception.