Synthetos Shop

Control TinyG From Arduino?

From the original Synthetos forum (2011–2025)

Started by andypop on in TinyG Support. 3 replies, last activity Jan 20, 2018.

andypop #

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!

Zootalaws #

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.

Zootalaws #

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.

cmcgrath5035Staff #

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?

This topic is from the original forum (January 2018). Your reply starts a new discussion linked to it.

Reply

Different problem? Ask a new question

Back to TinyG Support or latest activity.