GRBL Control Tab greyed out

[thommy884]

Hi there. I'm able to connect to my CNC3018pro (baudrate 115200, board with GRBL 0.8) but the grbl control tab is greyed out. If | use the normal control tab of octoprint, I can jog. I can turn on and off the spindle via terminal as well. Do u guys have an idea what I could try? Pls see the attached screenshot and octoprint logs, thanks a lot!

octoprint-systeminfo-20220321192109.zip

[synman]

Id like to see your terminal window. Notice how state is N/A?

[thommy884]

hi. wow, you are fast! yeah, I noticed that. Not much to see in the terminal (see attached).

[thommy884]

but when I jog via the ordinary control tab, then it looks like that:

[synman]

The built in control tab is not supported and it's dumb luck it is working at all. Please share your terminal window contents when attempting to connect.

I may find it in the state files you shared but yeah it would be a lot easier to just see what is being sent back and forth between Octoprint and your machine.

[synman]

hi. wow, you are fast! yeah, I noticed that. Not much to see in the terminal (see attached).

Do you mind sharing what machine it is you are trying to control. I'm guessing this is not a GRBL machine... Possibly Marlin.

[thommy884]

mind

Sure, it is this machine: https://de.aliexpress.com/item/4000096760805.html?gatewayAdapt=glo2deu&spm=a2g0o.order_list.0.0.21ef5c5f12hAcZ

This is a CNC 3018 Pro GRBL Control CNC Maschine. It works with ChiliPeppr, CNCjs or Candle. I already tested that. But Better GRBL Support would be the ideal choice for me because it is webbased, has a built in webcam support and so many plugins.

This is shown in the terminal when I disconnect and reconnect to the CNC:

[synman]

Ah... Grbl v.9

Status reporting is disabled.

Take a look at $10 ... You'll want to set it to 3.

$10=3

Report back results.

[synman]

Grbl v.9 documentation is here:. https://github.com/grbl/grbl/wiki/Configuring-Grbl-v0.9#grbl-settings

[thommy884]

Ok, so I changed $10 to 3 and this is what the terminal shows now:

[thommy884]

Update: First success: the grbl control tab is no more greyed out! But it does not react. The built in control tab still works.

[thommy884]

I guess I should play around with all those plugin grbl settings, right? sorry, I'm coming from 3D-Printing and this is all new to me.

[synman]

I see the signature line is blank so the plugin is unable to determine which version of grbl compliance it is supposed to use.

Have you tried doing a connect/disconnect and full restart of Octoprint?

I may have a regex issue with how the grbl version is being parsed.

[synman]

See the output of $I for more context here.

[synman]

You should also see if there is a newer firmware available for your machine.

Grbl .9 is ancient and technically not supported --- although I do try to make it work.

[thommy884]

So I restarted octoprint and the whole pi. The only thing that works within the grbl control tab is the home button (only when I previously jog via built-in control tab). I think I'll give a firmware update a try...but it is a no name board without any type of brand/indication. Should I just try to upload a firmware meant for a genmitsu 3018 pro? Or could I brick the controller in that case? Gonna do some research now. Any other suggestions? Thanks again!

[synman]

So long as it is a standard Arduino with a boot loader already loaded you should be able to flash the latest and greatest 8 bit version of grbl. Be sure and save your $$ settings before the flash as you'll likely need to reset them afterwards.

[synman]

do you mind sharing what your GRBL Control tab looks like now that we have $10 set to 3? I just took a quick look at the code and if signature is empty, it should default to GRBL .9 jogging.

I'd also like you to hit the direction buttons a couple times, toggle over to the terminal window afterwards and show me what is getting logged there.

[thommy884]

this is the GRBL control tab now: it is complaining all the time that "distance exceeds x axis". It's the same for y and z axis:

this is what the terminal looks like when I press the right button on x axis:

[thommy884]

Just updated to 1.1 and now i can jog, thank u so much! how can I test the spindle? M03 does not work...great plugin anyway!

[synman]

M3S####

with #### being some number within your min and max spindle speed settings.

I'm closing the issue. Fill free to open a discussion thread if you would like to discuss this further (aka not a bug :) )