A second consecutive CNC post, because I haven’t had time to write up long-form posts for months, and something requiring documentation came up today.
While I’m still quite happy with LinuxCNC (especially since I discovered NativeCAM), my adviser bought himself a GRBL-DB25 adapter board for his 3040T mentioned in my previous post. He has been unsurprisingly unsatisfied with the performance of the terrible old SFF P4 box he has been using to drive it with LinuxCNC, and we’ve (read: I’ve) become reasonably comfortable with grbl due to the several shitty diode laser cutters that have recently proliferated around here (One or more of the involved parties will be posting about those shortly). As I’ve noted elsewhere, grbl is not my first choice, but has reached baseline required functionality in versions >1.1 and is unarguably convenient.
In particular, he went with one of the Arduino Nano based boards floating around ebay with titles like USB 3-Axis CNC TB6560 Driver Board Controller Converter GRBL Arduino Nano DB25, which are unfortunately both undocumented and (as it turns out) unsuitable. He asked me to help set it up, and this post serves to document and warn based on my findings.
It seems like it should be a great solution, but it will not work with the typical black control boxes that come with many little aluminum CNC machines or most other common 3 or 4 axis breakout boards. It has the (dead) URL www.getlofi.com/grbl-to-3axis on the silkscreen, and while getlofi.com does appear to be a valid page run by some hackers mostly into circuit bending, I couldn’t shake any mention, much less relevant documentation out of the page. What I did find with a continuity tester and some patience is the following unfortunate arrangement:
The problem is that the designer decided to tie DB25 pins 2,6,and 14 together to nano pin 11 (D8) with traces on the adapter. This renders it completely unusable with the 2-7 StepX/DirX/StepY/DirY/StepZ/DirZ pinout the vast majority of boards use, as StepX and StepZ are wired together. If I’m inferring which shitty blue TB6560 3-axis board it’s designed to work with correctly, 2, 6, and 14 are intended to be per-axis stepper enable pins, but that is not a particularly common configuration.
For contrast, I picked up one of the Arduino GRBL to DB25 CNC Shield Kits available from “Ron” on Tindie to throw in my parts bin for testing. It’s actually documented, supports the pin-out most parallel control boards I’ve encountered use (with the default grbl pinout no less), and has each individual pin broken out like a sane designer, so it should support any reasonable configuration. I tried my tindie board with the machine that was supposed to get the fail board, and it seems to work fine, so I’m going to encourage picking up one of those instead (unless we get ambitious and just cut our own DB25-Nano board).
