gcode sender

written by relyq

published on: 2023-03-18

touchscreen interface controller running on FreeRTOS for GRBL-based CNC machines.

this is a device with a touchscreen interface to control grbl-based cnc machines. in mid 2021 i was asked by a factory to make them a cnc machine with a controller to just run one program. later on after finishing the machine i continued developing the firmware and added features to make it a more versatile and commercially viable product.

this was my first project using freertos, which made development faster and simpler and it was fairly easy to learn as it took me just a few weeks to get used to it.

it made me learn about concepts like multithreading, scheduling, tasks & priorities, and rtos structures such as queues, shared resources, semaphores, mutexes, etc.

i also learned about interfacing with SD cards, filesystems, and file explorer paging.

the main features are:

• main menu with buttons to perform a homing routine, set zero, go to zero, probe
• moving menu to control the three axes
• file explorer with multiple pages to load files from an SD card.
• receives and parses machine messages to get current position and stop the program if any errors or alerts are thrown.

source

img

menu screen

move

file explorer page 1

file explorer page 2

menu after selecting a file