That long

PicoCNC, the Raspbrerry Pi Pico based CNC control board, has finally emerged from development by Phil Barrettof Brookwood Design, which has a web store on Tindie.

PicoCNC, the Raspbrerry Pi Pico based CNC control board, has finally emerged from development by Phil Barrettof Brookwood Design, which has a web store on Tindie.

First mooted by publicly by him in April 2021, all went quiet in the grblHAL GitHub discussion that August, until now, two years later.

And the result looks very nice (and they seem to be flying off the shelves and the latest batch has sold out since last night….).

Engineer in Wonderland CNC-related blogs are indexed here

It is designed to run grblHAL, one of the 32bit gcode-to-motion programmes that have been built on the original grbl for 8bit Arduino processors – I believe Terje Io – ‘terjeio’ – lead grblHAL, and note that grblHAL has its own home threse days)

Available on many different 32bit processors, the Raspberry Pi RP2040 version of grblHAL gets twin 133MHz ArmCortex-M0+ cores to play on, and Barret adopted the Raspberry Pi Pico as a suitable way to get this processor onto a cnc controller board.

In the two year hiatus, the board has gained a microSD Card slot and can take the Raspberry Pi Pico W to add Wi-Fi to a project.

Away from the processor, the board has what looks like a really sensible mixture of opto-isolated inputs and buffered outputs that get the user well away from one of the weaknesses of the original Arduino designs – long wires in a noisy environment connected direct to the processor pins.

BTW, unlike many grbl boards and close relatives, this one does not include on-board stepper motor drivers – it is designed for (higher power) off-board motor driver units, which mostly have opto-isolated inputs – hence no optos on the outputs of the PicoCNC board.

Amongst its many facilities, it has:

I have no way to know how well this board works, but Barret has a good track record of successful projects (the other ‘official’ grblHAL board is by him too – there are several many other boards on which it can run).

BTW, Grbl_ESP32 by Bart Dring, the other major thrust towards post-8bit grbl, seems to be flourishing, has now been re-named FluidNC, and seems to have good hardware support too. Dring also has a Tindie store

How grblHAL (which has also been ported to ESP32) and FluidNC compare is beyond my ability to judge – I just feel lucky to be in a world with two open-source projects trying to make the same thing better.