

CNC USB CONTROLLER ARDUINO SERIAL
And after a lot of adjusting of Grbl settings, I was jogging around my CNC via serial terminal, yay! Eventually, I had it wired up to a Grbl flashed Arduino Duemilanove, with a ton of loose wires between the two. I dug up all the information I could find on my particular TB6560 controller board, including schematic and documentation, but being as how these are mass produced in China with several minor changes between each clone, the documentation was both helpful and misleading at times. It accepts GCODE from the computer, and Grbl translates this into pulses, used by stepper controllers, pushing around stepper motors, while providing feedback when any limit or control switches are hit. The basics of the project are, Arduino has a USB interface, which acts like a serial port. The board has plenty of power to push the steppers around, far more than any of the smaller / cheaper solutions had to offer I think, so I wanted to try and teach this board a few new tricks, and let me interface with it using a more modern interface.īeing as USB was the ideal interface, and from previous searching around, Grbl seems like a great solution. For those unfamiliar, boards like this are interfaced using an old fashioned LPT parallel port, which was initially an annoyance, but quickly became impractical and a hassle, having to use an old PC with VNC installed. I’ve had a CNC mill for a few years now, and while many homemade CNC mills use EasyDriver or Pololu, mine came with a sturdy, generic TB6560 controller board.
