When Free Software is not Free

CAD (Design) Software
37

Hey jedson, hey all,

just to be precise,

  • The Onefinity CNC Controller is a software and hardware fork of

  • the Buildbotics CNC Controller (Source). The G-code the Buildbotics Controller (and therefore the Onefinity Controller) understands is patterned after the LinuxCNC dialect of the G-code Standard.

  • The CAMotics 3D toolpath visualization software has the same author as the Buildbotics CNC Controller. CAMotics supports a subset of LinuxCNC GCode.

  • LinuxCNC evolved from the NIST’s Enhanced Machine Controller (EMC) project (See EMC History).

  • GRBL is free, open source software for controlling the motion of machines that move, that make things, or that make things move, and runs on wide variety of microcontrollers.

    The first version of GRBL was released in 2009 by Simen Svale Skogsrud. It was later picked up and led by Sungeun “Sonny” Jeon Ph.D who evolved it into a highly capable machine control system running on the Arduino family of microcontroller boards. It makes incredibly efficient use of the 8-bit Atmel processors on the Arduinos and is an amazing feat of software engineering to get so much from such a humble processor.

    Grbl is a no-compromise, high performance, low cost alternative to parallel-port-based motion control for CNC milling. It will run on a vanilla Arduino (Duemillanove/Uno) as long as it sports an Atmega 328.

    The controller is written in highly optimized C utilizing every clever feature of the AVR-chips to achieve precise timing and asynchronous operation. It is able to maintain up to 30kHz of stable, jitter free control pulses.

    It accepts standards-compliant g-code and has been tested with the output of several CAM tools with no problems. Arcs, circles and helical motion are fully supported, as well as, all other primary g-code commands. Macro functions, variables, and most canned cycles are not supported, but we think GUIs can do a much better job at translating them into straight g-code anyhow.

    Grbl includes full acceleration management with look ahead. That means the controller will look up to 18 motions into the future and plan its velocities ahead to deliver smooth acceleration and jerk-free cornering.

All of this is free and open source software (unlike the software the original poster is whining about)

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