Spindle and speed

From the original Synthetos forum (2011–2025)

Started by skinnytod on in grblShield Support. 2 replies, last activity Mar 18, 2014.

#

Hi - I'm trying to figure out how grbl (and the grbl shield) deals with spindle control. I've seen this in the docs for grbl

If you have a desire or need for spindle or coolant control, Grbl will toggle these output pins (D12, D13, A3) high or low, depending on the g-code commands you send to Grbl. Since these are all application dependent, we'll leave it to you on how to control and use these for your machine.

Which implies that the spindle pins for enable and direction are digital pins and are simply toggled based on passed gcodes - but this leaves me to wonder if or how speed is handled. I wondered if it used PWM - but those pins don't support PWM.

(I realize this may be too grbl-specific but I've been searching all over and haven't found any clear info concerning spindle speed - except for stray comments which imply that it is handled somehow.

Other than that, the grbl shield works great!

#

Do you mean spindle speed?
Also, did you find out how to hook up D12 pin on a grblshield in order to use M3 gcode for spindle on/off?

#

Yes, I meant speed, in addition to direction and enable.

After digging around, I realized I had mashed up some info @ the current version (.8c) and the dev version. Apparently the dev version supports some method of PWM for spindle speed. Currently speed isn't handled at all.

Hooking up to pins 12 & 13? I just soldered on some header pins. Those could be connected to a relay or as in my case, a separate Arduino.

This topic is from the original forum (March 2014). Your reply starts a new discussion linked to it.

Reply

Different problem? Ask a new question

Back to grblShield Support or latest activity.