Control TinyG From Arduino?

Home › Forums › TinyG › TinyG Support › Control TinyG From Arduino?

Tagged: ,

Viewing 4 posts - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • January 19, 2018 at 3:14 pm #10768
    andypop
    Member

    Hello!

    I’m curious if it would be possible to control the tinyG with an arduino.

    Because of the nature of the USB protocol a USB connection between the devices is not possible – they are both too ‘dumb’ to serve as a host.

    I don’t yet have a tinyG, from the website visually I see no way to connect an arduino to a tinyG via I2C or any other manner. Is such a thing possible?

    If I even managed to get them connected via something like I2C would feeding GCODE to the tinyG over I2C be feasible? The sending-instructions-programatically wiki suggests that I could.

    Thanks in advance for your input!

    January 19, 2018 at 8:08 pm #10769
    Zootalaws
    Member

    Whats your use case?

    In essence, the TinG is an arduino, so you want to control one micro controller with another? Where does a human get a look in?

    You can control using the serial lines or SPI or ICSP, just like a uno or nano.

    You can iterate the TinyG code on an arduino, so it stands to reason that all the interfaces on an arduino are supported.

    But I can’t see what you are trying to achieve.

    January 19, 2018 at 8:19 pm #10770
    Zootalaws
    Member

    Further, I have connected via Bluetooth and the serial I/f, esp8266 and both serial and USB, and (slowly) through a LoRa connection and the serial I/f.

    USB is perfectly feasible, isn’t a protocol, and is supported for bidirectional traffic, natively. When you tell your arduino to report back a condition using Serial.println() you are doing exactly that, using the USB port for Comms. The FTDI chip or whatever brand is implemented as a seria-to-USB controller is there for a reason, is controllable and is capable of megabit speeds (I regularly talk to my WeMos devices at ~1Mbit over USB).

    You may find locating a cable with compatible connectors on both ends difficult, but that’s what solder’s for.

    January 19, 2018 at 8:44 pm #10771
    cmcgrath5035
    Moderator

    The tinyG FW is natively interfacing with a serial I/O bus via on chip UART that “happens” to be connected to the FTDI USB to serial converter at the front end. It is possible to bypass the FTDI and wire-or a logic level Tx/Rx pair directly to the UART. One must of course be mindful of 3.3V logic interfacing.

    Zootalaws has implemented a Bt link which bypasses the USB and others a while back were using small wifi dongles to do the same. This is not a typical connection, but connection point are available on most versions of tinyG, you may need to solder in header pins. Schematics for all versions are here:

    https://github.com/synthetos/TinyG/tree/master/hardware/v8schematics.
    There are a lot of folks interfacing to tinyG using a RasPi micro, USB and both CNC.js and Chilipeppr, both SPJS and the full CP web application running well on a RasPi3.

    Zootalaws has already posed the key question – what are your constraints and what are you seeking to achieve?

  • Author
    Posts
Viewing 4 posts - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.