Comment by abakker
Do you not consider Mach4/UCCNC/Masso/Centroid Acorn to be hobby? I’ve never encountered a hobby grade controller without loops.
Do you not consider Mach4/UCCNC/Masso/Centroid Acorn to be hobby? I’ve never encountered a hobby grade controller without loops.
Yeah - I guess as a someone who considers my machining "non professional", I've never even really consider GRBL for a machine because "running G code" and "running a mill/router/lathe" feel like different categories. the lack of a reasonable GUI and access to the configurations and macros to handle things like tool changes etc. has never made me interested in GRBL. (I've only ever played with GRBL in the context of a router that needed to be run by UGS) and that felt so limited as to be useless.
That said, I'm on the brink of converting both my mill and router from UCCNC to Centroid just to be into some software that is more "machine operator aware" meaning that it offers more features targeting making my life easier as an operator, rather than simply running gcode in a machine-agnostic way.
G41,G68, S curve acceleration, and basic things for parking positions, pause, resume, single block, separate feed rate and rapid rate overrides, etc. Those would be pretty basic and important. Also, good gui driven probing routines, TLO calculators, and a sane tool library.
They are the high-end/legacy-end of hobby CNC.
The Grbl/Arduino stuff seems most prevalent/commonly sold.
That said, I was remiss in not mentioning LinuxCNC, &c., and as you note, they do have a more traditional G-code implementation w/ loops and variables and branches.
But, I don't think that this simulator supports all of that --- could someone post a sample program which does that sort of thing and test it?