CNC Milling

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 controller application with G-Code visualizer written in Qt.

Supported functions:

  • Controlling GRBL-based cnc-machine via console commands, buttons on form, numpad.
  • Monitoring cnc-machine state.
  • Loading, editing, saving and sending of G-code files to cnc-machine.
  • Visualizing G-code files.