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robomechs / 6-AXIS-USBCNC-GRBL

This repository is based on https://github.com/usbcnc/grbl which in turn is based on https://github.com/gnea/grbl
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Using Serial1 and USB at the same time? #2

Open Alfrederson opened 5 years ago

Alfrederson commented 5 years ago

Today I was wondering what would it take to enable both USB and Serial1 at the same time. Enabling Serial1 just for sending a duplicate of the report would be trivial (just uncomment #ifndef USEUSB in line 177 of serial.c and uncomment #ifndef USEUSB in line 104 of main.c, which calls USART1_Configuration(115200);). This would be useful for providing data for something like a DRO or sending it via bluetooth to an android/tablet, but what if I wanted to use both at the same time? Would I need to keep separate buffers for USB rx data and for Usart1 so text coming from both don't get mixed up? With this it would be possible to use a cellphone for control without having the machine plugged to a computer, or even make it wifi-ready using ESP3D, while at the same time being able to control from a PC.

robomechs commented 5 years ago

This is complex and unpredictable way to use it))

MonkeyPigCNC commented 5 years ago

If the reporting was mirrored to a serial port you could easily use that to update a seperate Arduino to display the position and status. I'm have not looked into this as I'm currently designing a 5 axis board for this but that would be really useful to pretty up the front panel of my 3040, and I could use a cheap LCD shield with touch on an uno to also implement the feed hold/reset etc buttons.

Alfrederson commented 5 years ago

If the reporting was mirrored to a serial port you could easily use that to update a seperate Arduino to display the position and status. I'm have not looked into this as I'm currently designing a 5 axis board for this but that would be really useful to pretty up the front panel of my 3040, and I could use a cheap LCD shield with touch on an uno to also implement the feed hold/reset etc buttons.

Monkey, have you tried compiling this firmware for another mcu in the same line with more GPIO's like RBT6? 5 axes leaves very few pins on the C8T6

MonkeyPigCNC commented 5 years ago

No, I only have a blue pill stm32 at the moment, but I was not wanting to send anything back, just use the reporting to show work position on the display, and have some icons on it to use the touchscreen as the 'buttons'. Not sure at all if it would work at all but as I only have the schematic drawn at the moment I could move a couple of pins to free the serial port I think. I was thinking that having a seperate Arduino or bluepill to display would not mess with anything grbl is doing actually running the machine, but just do it passively. I'm a hardware engineer mostly and only really dabble in software as a hobby. I'm sort of just thinking what I can do with the bits I have at present, and build from there.

Regards Simon

On Tue, 26 Feb 2019, 00:04 Alfrederson, notifications@github.com wrote:

If the reporting was mirrored to a serial port you could easily use that to update a seperate Arduino to display the position and status. I'm have not looked into this as I'm currently designing a 5 axis board for this but that would be really useful to pretty up the front panel of my 3040, and I could use a cheap LCD shield with touch on an uno to also implement the feed hold/reset etc buttons.

Monkey, have you tried compiling this firmware for another mcu in the same line with more GPIO's like RBT6? 5 axes leaves very few pins on the C8T6

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mstrens commented 5 years ago

I would also be interested having the possibility of using USB or UART without having to reflash the STM32. For a group of makers, we made a pcb to support the blue pill, interface it to TB6600 (via ULN2803), add a relay for router switching, and add RC filter on each imputs (limits,...). It is foreseen that this project could be controlled from the PC (via USB) or from another stand alone ESP32 microcomputer (via UART). It would be nice to be able to flash only once the firmware into the blue pill for both config.

mstrens commented 5 years ago

I made changes in order to support USB and UART at the same time. In fact it is not "at the same time" because if you send characters to GRBL via the 2 ways simultanously, GRBL will mix all received characters and will fail. So, send the data to GRBL only from one source at the time. GRBL sent his replies to both canals.

The code is available at (in branch USB_and_SERIAL https://github.com/mstrens/grbl_6axis_on_stm32/tree/USB_and_SERIAL

Please take care that:

If this code is OK, it would be quite easy to mofify it in order to let the user select between 3 options USEUSB, USEUART and USEBOTH.

mstrens commented 5 years ago

Please note that the code in previous message is not OK. In the mean time, I made change on my site in the master branch in order to use TX buffer and interrupt when sending data. Currently the same TX buffer is used for UART or USB. So it is not possible to use both at the same time. This would require using 2 different Tx buffers. Furthermore it could be that the program locks if USB Tx buffer becomes full if USB is not up and running