alden

Chris – I see where my documentation was messed up and confused you.

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In order to get this thing tuned let’s start with the current settings. I had written this up for grblshield and now it’s also on the TinyG wiki: http://www.synthetos.com/wiki/index.php?title=Wiring_TinyG

In your case since you only have one pot just crank it one way until you either get the thermal reaction or the motors gradually lose power and shut down. I always then mark with a sharpie. The new boards are a little easier to manage. as clockwise increases current. Run some test moves as G0’s and perhaps some slow G1 with slow F words (that’s the Gcode pun. I had to use it.)

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UPDATE: There’s a bug in the units conversion from inches to mm in verions 0.90 and 0.91. So I’m not doing this correctly in the version of the firmware you are running. This will be revised with the correct conversion soon – hopefully over the weekend. (The originally published value of 2,000,000 was actually correct, but I changed the code in error).

In the mean time, the following will work: Set your Jm to 3000 and work up or down from there. Or just set the value in mm (e.g. 50,000,000) using a G21. Change back to inches mode using a G20.

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Once you have the current and JM set correctly I’d go back to the seek and feed rates and adjust these values
http://www.synthetos.com/wiki/index.php?title=TinyG:Configuring#Setting_Feed_and_Seek_Rates

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I have created a profile for DIYLILCNC so when you get the values where you like them let me know and I’ll update the profile. The defaults can them be put in the code alongside the other profiles.

Lastly, if you haven’t already done so, get the latest code form the github and use that. I posted 0.91 (build 324.15) earlier this week. It fixes a bug in arc generation that you probably had not encountered. yet.

Let us know how this goes, and thanks for hammering through this. As you can see, we are trying to get our documentation up to par as these issues are encountered.

– Alden

Chris – I ran the 322.02 version with the settings you provided over the weekend. I couldn’t get it to reproduce the issue. Some notes:

– Since you have the low-power idle mode disabled on X and Y the green lights may stay lit once things have stopped. This is normal. But they shouldn’t be flashing.

– The Jerk term you have (2,000,000 inches/min^3) is really really high. The 3rd power makes it hard to compare inches to mm settings – so converting to mm is a really big number. Did you arrive at this experimentally? You might want to drop this somewhat. I should probably have some guidance on setting this in the wiki.

I uploaded a new version of the code to the github. https://github.com/synthetos/TinyG
You should see version 0.91 (build 324.15) up there. Can you try this out and see if the issue persists?

Thanks – Alden

This is pretty straightforward to code in – I just haven’t done it yet. Let’s get it on the list over the next couple of months

Thanks for pointing that out. The correct mapping is in the system.h file and is:
#define DEVICE_PORT_MOTOR_1 PORTA
#define DEVICE_PORT_MOTOR_2 PORTF
#define DEVICE_PORT_MOTOR_3 PORTE
#define DEVICE_PORT_MOTOR_4 PORTD

I’ll fix the wiki

I’d say that the spindle control is “roughed in” at this point, but it is not functioning. The interpreter reads M3, M4 and M5, but the spindle control functions are stubbed out. What these should probably do is fire 2 output pins, one for ON/OFF, and the other for CW/CCW motion. Also, a full implementation would have a PWM channel and pin to output a motor control speed signal. The pins are there on the board to do this, but the code has not been written. Some form of external power management would also have to be provided for driving the motors – which TinyG does not do as it’s outside the current design.

That said, most people are using the board without automatic spindle control just by turning the cutter on and off manually. That’s why this function has lagged the others. TinyG is quite hackable and the code is all on the github for anyone to add these functions, I just haven’t gotten to them.

Hope this helps, and let us know if you have any other questions

The Arduino and TinyG run 2 different chip families and programming protocols, so the avrdude command lines will be different. The xmega on TinyG runs the PDI protocol, which is why a garden variety atmel programmer won’t cut it and the mkii is needed. If you just bought it it’s unlikely that you need to upgrade your firmware, so you should probably save that as a last resort.

Riley’s written up the AVRdude settings and instructions for programing from Linux here. Check the settings in the Ubuntu section.
http://www.synthetos.com/wiki/index.php?title=Installing_TinyG
It looks like you have the settings right, though. Did you work from this example? Also, your board may have an xmega 192 instead of a 256. Try changing that setting to the 192 if so.

I’m not really familiar with these as I always use AVRstudio4 to get my work done. If you haven’t done this already I’d recommend bringing up AVRstudio4 on your windows box and working from there. The IDE is a bit 1999, and it is Windows, but it works very reliably for me. I tried AVRstudio5 when it first came out but it had some bugs – especially in the programming sections. So I stuck with 4. It may be time to try 5 again.

I hope this helps – let us know how it goes.

Sonny Jeon (Chamnit) is working on connecting an eStop to grbl. The challenge is doing this right with deceleration. I could ping him and find out how he’s done it, and how far along he is. BTW – you should grab his fork for your work. He’s done a really nice job on the cornering algorithm and a few other improvements.