Hey Greg,
when considering the Onefinity manufacturer’s efforts to further develop their onefinity-firmware, I don’t think I would use Onefinity’s fork to further develop the Buildbotics controller. I would rather join upstream development and get involved in the Buildbotics CNC controller in buildbotics/bbctrl-firmware. As you can see on the onefinity-firmware 1.0.9 source code, Joseph Coffland is still the author in the (free) licence at the top of every py file for the raspi, as well in every c file for the AVR microcontroller. You could contact the author of the Buildbotics CNC Controller (jcoffland at github.com) directly and tell them you want to contribute.
What I think the Buildbotics CNC Controller needs, besides the capability of adjusting feed rate on the fly and more sophisticated methods to probe a workpiece, is more hardware buttons. The only hardware button that has an effect to the software is the “estop” pin on 25-pin I/O interface, that makes the system enter the “estopped mode” that is also available on the Big Red-Yellow button icon on the top right of the Web User Interface (not on the Big Red-Yellow Button Onefinity black box!) and that stops not only the steppers, but also the spindle or the router. What I would program first, is a hardware “Pause” and “Stop” button. And, as you suggested, a good api. Maybe there are points to trigger actions that you can find if you dive into the code, but contacting the author and getting involved into development upstream would be easier than trying this alone.
The last time I had a look at the recent version of the web interface py file of Onefinity’s fork, I really would not like to work on it. They change the programming style all over.
I have a working Onefinity Controller that I leave at version 1.0.9 of onefinity-firmware. And by the way, I don’t plan to use it as the CNC Controller for my own machine.
– Source: What is the 1F future? We need to know – Post #11 by Aiph5u