Raspberry Pi CNC Board / Hat

2015/06/17 8:47 pm / / Featured

We are happy to announce the next generation of our CNC boards.

Raspberry-Pi-CNC-Board-1

By combining a real-time CNC system (good old GRBL) and offloading less timely processes to a more powerful processor + operating system we have created a much more flexible but capable solution.

To show some of the possibilities we have created a Web / Browser app to allow users to remotely control their CNC machines. (Welcome to the Internet-Of-Things)

Raspberry-Pi-CNC-User-Interface

The app code also includes a working example on how to expand your ecosystem by taking advantage of what we call the “Command Router” and “Single Command Mode” system. It allows us to add custom commands that can execute a shell command, one command at a time without getting buffered / queued in GRBL.

Custom command examples:

  • Simple – Send Email Notifications / Flash a warning light / Play a warning sound / Switch on a relay.
  • Moderate – Wait for external inputs like temperature, safety switches to clear before moving to the next command.
  • Complex – CNC Clustering, combining CNC machines to form a pipeline of operations like in a moving assembly line.

Extra Links:

Raspberry Pi CNC Board – Gallery:

 

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61 Thoughts on “Raspberry Pi CNC Board / Hat”

  1. Bryant Bair on 2015/06/17 at 10:44 pm said:

    I’ve been waiting for something just like this. I wish there were a fourth axis (slaved or independent), either on the board or available as a breakout board but I’ll take what I can get.

    Ordered one on Ebay 🙂

    • Bertus Kruger on 2015/06/18 at 9:14 pm said:

      Thanks for the feedback. We looked at adding a 4th axis but had some issues finding the right spacers to lift the board above the USB and Ethernet plug. I have a few ideas on how to get around it but will take a bot of time to fine tune. Your order will be shipped ASAP.. 🙂

  2. Doug on 2015/06/18 at 12:33 am said:

    Looks great! Is there a way to add a cloned stepper for running 2 steppers on one axis.? Any plans to for external drivers to run bigger (nema34) motors?

    • Bertus Kruger on 2015/06/18 at 9:17 pm said:

      Thanks… Yes, we are looking into the cloning idea and adding another stepper driver. If we have space left we will add a breakout for external drivers. 😉

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  4. daniel on 2015/06/28 at 7:17 pm said:

    could this work with win 10 and Mach3 cnc

    • Bertus Kruger on 2015/06/28 at 7:44 pm said:

      I would not think so. MACH3 uses a parallel port where as this board uses a Micro-controller running GRBL to do the hard work and the Raspberry Pi to do the user interface and connectivity.

  5. Bob on 2015/08/01 at 9:42 pm said:

    I have order your pi hat and waiting on it, My question is the arduino nano using the code as the arduino cnc shield, if not can I get the source in case I need to replace the nano in the future

  6. Bob on 2015/08/03 at 2:26 pm said:

    thanx

  7. Vasken on 2015/08/07 at 6:10 pm said:

    Hey Bertus,

    I’ve ordered and received the CNC hat. It’s really nice!

    I was able to get the Universal Gcode Sender program to run on the RPi, but I’m not able to get it to communicate with the Arduino.

    How do you set it up so that the RPi looks on its GPIO pins for an Arduino instead of a COM port?

    Also, is there a tutorial on how to install and use your web-based solution shown above?

    Thanks,
    Vasken

  8. Pedro Santos on 2015/08/24 at 1:07 am said:

    Can I use the raspberry pi B?
    I don’t have any raspberry pi 2 B

  9. Dr. Electronics muah ahahahah on 2015/08/27 at 8:13 pm said:

    Hi, I was looking for this a long time, you use serial port to communicate with arduino, and the spi channel can be used?
    Its for this type of display: http://www.sainsmart.com/raspberry-pi/sainsmart-9-inch-tft-lcd-800-480-touch-screen-display-for-raspberry-pi-2-b-b.html
    this uses spi to control the touch screen.

    best regards
    Electronicarts

    • Bertus Kruger on 2015/08/27 at 9:07 pm said:

      With a little bit of modification,yes. The Board is only connected to the first 5×2 pins and the SPI pins are not used at all.

  10. Rich on 2015/09/26 at 2:17 am said:

    Just ordered one of these HATs… looking forward to it. Do you have a link to the correct Molex connectors for the Stepper Ports?

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  12. Andreas Pettersson on 2015/10/17 at 8:49 am said:

    Im curious how you made the serial connection between the RPi and the Nano, using the nanos pins instead of the usb connector. Im thinking of connecting a nano to a STM32f7, making basicly a hat/shield or adapting an existing board to do that.

    would be great with some insight. I find that making a UI on stm32f7 and attaching a grbl arduino nano to that would be a good compact solution.. if i could figure out how i would access the pins (thats why im tinkering with the idea of taking an existing arduino shield)

  13. TroyLeeLee on 2015/10/20 at 3:01 pm said:

    Will it be a problem if I still wanna use other GPIO pin?
    Because the margin looks too close to put a ribbon cable beneath it.

    • Bertus Kruger on 2015/11/15 at 8:50 am said:

      The board uses the standard pin heights and can be stacked on top of other boards. So yes, it should allow you to get to the GPIO.

  14. Matthias on 2015/10/26 at 7:14 am said:

    do you have any other download source for the Raspberry Pi bCNC Image as it is not possible to download it via DropBox any more.
    That would be very nice!

    • Bertus Kruger on 2015/10/28 at 5:19 am said:

      Thanks for the feedback. Drop-box tend to disable the download if the daily download bandwidth has been exceeded. I am looking for more similar services but have not found any viable ones yet. Does anyone have suggestions on this?

      • Josh on 2015/10/30 at 3:09 pm said:

        I would recommend uploading the file to google drive and making the zip or whatever format you put it in accessible to anybody with the link. If you haven’t used Drive yet I highly recommend it, as its already set up if you have a gmail account and provides you with free 15GB storage.

  15. Jose on 2015/11/17 at 11:52 pm said:

    This HAT makes a lot of sense, I’m buying one because all of the smart decisions! Brilliant compact solution.

    I use OctoPrint to control my CNC. If the communication between Arduino and RPi is serial it should just work, or am I missing something?

    I’ll be making a enclosure for it, has someone done this already with a laser cutter or 3d printer?

    • Bertus Kruger on 2015/11/29 at 9:00 am said:

      It should work yes. Not sure about the case bit… It will need plenty of air to get rid of the extra heat… 😉

      • Jose on 2015/12/11 at 10:53 pm said:

        Got the hat, it’s very cool.

        Octoprint doesn’t work with GRBL out of the box (it relies on codes like M105 to check status). But I installed Teacup and the important bits seem to work well.

        (Not related to the HAT but) I tried programming the Nano from the RPi, using ttyAMA0 but that doesn’t seem to work. I had to use the mini USB and another computer with the Arduino IDE. Not sure why.

  16. Klaas on 2015/11/30 at 8:21 am said:

    Just ordered one on eBay. Can it control a laser too?

  17. Alex on 2015/12/09 at 10:00 pm said:

    I haven’t found anything about E-STOP, Resume, Hold and Abort contacts in wiki. I see them unpopulated, but don’t know how they could be used. Do you plan to add some info about them?

  18. Bjoern on 2015/12/24 at 1:41 am said:

    How do I flash grbl v0.9j from RPI to the hat? The wiki link does not work. My command line is: /usr/bin/avrdude -C/etc/avrdude.con -pm328p -cardunio -P/dev/ttyAMA0 -D -Uflah:w:grbl_v0_9_j_armega328p_16mhz_115200.hex

    If I execute avrdude with -v -v -v -v, first lines are:
    avrdude: Send: 0 [30] [20]
    avrdude: Send: 0 [30] [20]
    avrdude: Send: 0 [30] [20]
    avrdude: ser_rec(): programmer is not responding
    avrdude: stk500_rec(): programmer is not responding
    avrdude: stk500_getsync(): attempt 1 of 10: not in sync: resp=0x00

    Connecting with “picocom -b 115200 /dev/ttyAMA0” works.

    Any idea?

    BR

    Bjoern

    • Bjoern on 2015/12/29 at 11:43 am said:

      I got it work.
      I removed the Arduino from the hat and connect the USB on the Arduino directly to the PC from where i flashed.

    • Bjoern on 2015/12/29 at 11:48 am said:

      On the backside of the hat, there are several not connected pins, like
      – E(mergency)-STOP,
      – RESUME,
      – HOLD &
      – ABORD.
      Can I connect them to switches?
      If yes, shall I connect to GND oro to +5V from from the hat?
      Is anything else needed?

      BR

      Bjoern

      • Bertus Kruger on 2015/12/30 at 1:16 pm said:

        Yes,you can connect them to switches. All of the pins work by getting grounded. GRBL supports this without any changes needed.

    • Bertus Kruger on 2015/12/30 at 1:14 pm said:

      Hi there, at the moment the controller can only be programmed via the USB connector. (it needs extra level shifters to make this work)

  19. Doug Johnson on 2016/01/02 at 2:29 pm said:

    When will a 4th Axis or cloned Axis be available?

  20. Stephen Lyda on 2016/01/03 at 8:51 am said:

    Do you have technical specs available, such as the maximum voltage and current the driver can supply to the motor? I have an old CNC frame with Applied Motion 5034-349 (NEMA 34) motors that I want to see if this will be able to handle. Didn’t see these specs on the wiki. Thank you.

    • Bertus Kruger on 2016/01/04 at 10:09 am said:

      Hi there, it depends on the Stepper drivers that are used with this board. Options are https://www.pololu.com/product/1182 and https://www.pololu.com/product/2133 . Th all depends on the stepper motor current anything over 2 Amps and the above drivers will start to struggle. Luckily there is the option to user external drivers making it possible to use Gecko drivers that goes up to I think 8amp.

      • Stephen Lyda on 2016/01/18 at 11:33 am said:

        Do you have a Getting Started guide? I’ve installed the CNC Hat, installed the motor drivers (A4988), used your pre-loaded OS image, and connected a little stepper motor to one axis. bCNC says it’s connected but when I jog the axis nothing happens physically and I’m not sure how to troubleshoot. Also not sure how to launch the CNC web interface after downloading it from Github.

        • Bertus Kruger on 2016/01/18 at 8:48 pm said:

          Hi Stephen, your feedback on Ebay has been noted and I have started work on a guide. In the mean time you can have a look at bCNC’s wiki for more details. https://github.com/vlachoudis/bCNC/wiki.

        • Bertus Kruger on 2016/01/18 at 8:53 pm said:

          The latest image I provided has CNC.js installed and a shortcut on the desktop to launch it. Double click it once and wait for the terminal window to come up. Once that is going you can connect to the RPI from another computers browser. The RPI’s url is http://:8000 with RPI-IP being the Raspberry Pi’s IP address.

          • Stephen Lyda on 2016/01/19 at 4:32 pm said:

            Thank you for the quick response. I got the remote CNC web interface up and figured out my problem was related to the power supply. Looking forward to using this even more! BTW, my simple stepper motor was from an old CD ROM drive and would make for a good tutorial for other newbies like me 🙂

  21. Marko on 2016/01/08 at 5:11 am said:

    Does it work with the newer raspberry pi 2?

  22. Mikhail on 2016/01/31 at 7:20 am said:

    Hi Bertus! The board works fine via usb (when Arduino nano is connected via usb) on pi 2 and on pi zero. However the board doesn’t work then placed on 40pin connector. It does connect to Serial port, but when I try to send a command I am getting:
    in bCNC
    SerialException: device reports readiness to read but returned no data
    or
    SerialException: write failed: Input/output error.
    In Universal Gcode Sender
    Error message box “Grbl has not finished booting”
    Any idea why? It looks like there is a level shifter problem or some interference in signal lines. I’ve got same behavior with or without stepper power, on pi 2 or pi zero, with Grbl 0.9i (as received) or Grbl 0.9j (flashed later). The board is otherwise nice with very convenient connectors.
    Thank you!

  23. Bertus Kruger on 2016/02/09 at 8:11 pm said:

    I am happy to announce that we now have a dedicated Forum for people to share their projects and ideas. http://forum.protoneer.co.nz/

    For that reason I am now closing the comment section on this page.

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