The reason phil-barret is important, is that, as Brookwood Design, phil-barrett has already sold hundreds ( Update: almost 600, see comment below) of a similar, well-received, CNC breakout board ( right) for the powerful (600MHz Cortex-M7) Teensy 4.1 MCU-on-module – which will control up to five axes and is available as a partial kit though Tindie. It looks like ‘phil-barrett’ is co-operating, and developing a breakout board called PicoCNC that will accept a Raspberry Pi Pico and convert its IO to the correct voltages for driving four stepper controllers plus ancillaries, as well as opto-isolating inputs from the CNC machine and handling the Pico’s power supply. The community has already ported it to multiple processors, and ‘terjeio’ is developing a branch aimed at Raspberry Pi Pico board, making specific use of its use the novel PIO serial data co-processors built into the on-board Raspberry Pi’s RP2040 MCU to make appropriate signals.
Please correct me in the comments if I have got this wrong. And being smaller, the grblHAL hardware can now be located right next to the stepper drivers, keeping the fast pulses within short local connections.
In my limited understanding, a PC (or a Raspberry Pi) will still be needed to send instructions to grblHAL, but this can be over a less taxing standard USB or Ethernet connection to the grblHAL hardware.
GrblHAL is in two parts: an easy-to-port hardware abstraction layer (where the HAL in the name comes from) and an instruction-reading number-crunching core ( diagram right).Īlthough below the radar for many ‘serious’ CNC users – more used to Mach4, Mach3 or LinuxCNC on PCs – my guess is that grblHAL will rapidly get noticed when people realise they no longer need export high rate pulses from a PC right next to the milling machine or router.
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