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Mach3Controller - UDP Display and Controller
« on: June 29, 2020, 02:59:39 AM »
Hi everyone, long time lurker here with a project I started after buying a Workbee CNC.
These forums were a wealth of information and I decided to share what I've been working on.
It's only fitting since all of you shared what you knew and without that knowledge, I wouldn't have been able to do this project or fall in love with this amazing hobby (that now pays me surprisingly).

Mach3Controller is an open source python script, using UDP, that can communicate with any programmable wifi device.
A macropump script writes coordinates (and more if you want) to a text file. In my tests, the performace was excellent, since this operation is given to Windows Explorer, and doesn't bog down Mach3. It came about because I wanted to display coordinates to an ESP8266 with a 20x4 LCD.



It was really good, except it was using a macropump script sending the coordinates over serial directly in Mach3, and if I didn't use "Sleep" of at least 400, Mach3 would start to slow down, which is no bueno for our cnc machines, I don't need messed up workpieces.

I experimented with writing to a text file, and picking that data up outside Mach3. Utilizing Python we can read the file and send it over Serial, Serial over Bluetooth, Websocket, and my favorite: UDP. I have working examples of all of the other ones if interested. I wanted to make this whole thing wireless, so that led me to the ESP8266 and ESP32, incredibly powerful and cheap microcontrollers. You can attach an LCD or OLED to them, buttons, analog sticks and use these small controllers to make our lives easier.

Sending the coordinates was not a problem in all scenarios, however sending info back, was.
Until I started using UDP that is. We set one port to send and one port to receive, and voila, it works.
You can also have many devices, all receiving the coordinate info and sending commands back.

I just started using App Inventor to make myself a working Android app and wanted to share with all of you it's progress:


I will be uploading more of my code and whatnot to the github, getting it all organized is a pain, but worth it, because if even one other person finds this useful, then it was worth it to me.

Thank you so much for being so awesome and sharing what you know. I will try to update this thread with new stuff and feel free to ask me questions.

Offline Tweakie.CNC

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Re: Mach3Controller - UDP Display and Controller
« Reply #1 on: June 29, 2020, 03:12:17 AM »
Excellent work Niknar1900, thank you for sharing it with us.

Tweakie.
PEACE
Re: Mach3Controller - UDP Display and Controller
« Reply #2 on: June 29, 2020, 03:17:51 AM »
Here is a video of the beta android app working, as I cycle through the commands.
https://youtu.be/_n05Wd7j5vs
Re: Mach3Controller - UDP Display and Controller
« Reply #3 on: June 29, 2020, 03:19:56 AM »
Excellent work Niknar1900, thank you for sharing it with us.

Tweakie.

I wanted to thank you most of all. When I was searching for solutions to my problems I had with my cnc or looking for more info about Mach3, your posts always had the answers I was looking for.
Re: Mach3Controller - UDP Display and Controller
« Reply #4 on: December 09, 2020, 09:31:59 PM »
I used DP7.0+USB CNC Controller to make a sculpture.