Alden Hart, the creator of TinyG and the grblShield will be in town later this month and will give a talk at the 1/23/2014 CNC Build Club @7:00pm. The meeting is open to members and non-members. If you want to attend, please RSVP via Meetup.
The grblShield is a basic stepper motor driver Arduino Uno Shield. It is part of the standard parts list for the Shapeoko and there are thousands of these in the field. It can also act as a shield for the Arduino Due and run a special version of TinyG firmware.
The TinyG project is a multi-axis motion control system. It is designed for CNC applications and other applications that require highly precise motion control. TinyG is meant to be a complete embedded solution for small/medium motor control. Here are some of the main features of the v8 hardware.
- Integrated motion control system with embedded microcontroller (Atmel ATxmega192)
- 4 stepper motor drivers (TI DRV8818) integrated on a ~4 inch square board
- Stepper drivers handle 2.5 amps per winding which will handle most motors up thru NEMA23 and some NEMA34 motors
- Accepts Gcode from USB port and interprets it locally on the board
- 6-axis control (XYZ + ABC rotary axes) maps to any 4 motors
- Constant jerk acceleration planning (3rd order S curves) for smooth and fast motion transitions
- Very smooth step pulse generation using phase-optimized fractional-step DDA running at 50 Khz with very low jitter
- Networkable via SPI to support off-board devices and for networking multiple boards into multi-axis systems
- Microstepping up to 1/8 (optimized DDA makes this smoother than many 1/16 implementations)
