Hello All, I would like to know if anyone has had any success running the Openbuilds Machine Control software on Raspberry Pi. I would like to replace my laptop with a RPi and a 7" touchscreen dedicated to running the machine control program. I have tested many control programs and Openbuilds is by far one of the best.
Its possible but its unsupported. There are a few of us working out some issues with it, but its not ready from prime-time. I would also suggest using at least a 10" screen (or test out a 7" screen connected to a desktop) before you commit to a 7" screen. I ran a RPi for several months and have recently switched to a mini pc connected to a 10" touchscreen I had laying around: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07D77W8CZ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 For an all in one solution, Peter (they guy who is responsible for OB Control) uses one of these: PiPO X10 TV Box 10.8 Inch Mini PC Windows 10 & Android 5.1 US Plug If you really want to run on a PI, there are some unofficial AND unsupported directions in the wiki OpenBuilds/OpenBuilds-CONTROL
Thanks for the reply sharmstr. When you ran RPi did you have good results during the trial. I already have a RPi 3 B+ with a 7" screen and was hoping that it would run reasonably well with the openbuilds control software as I would like to remove my laptop from the dusty workshop environment. John
It did. Then it didnt. Then it sort of did. Like I said, there are a few of us working it out, but there's no ETA on when that will happen and there (at this point) is no plan to ever support it. You can do 90% of what you need to do using the jog widget with your phone. Hide your laptop under the table or elsewhere to give it a bit more protection from dust and use your phone to control.
Has anyone made any updates on this since the Raspberry Pi 4 came out? I tried the no compile method on my Pi and run into troubles. I am beginner with Pi and Linux so I have yet to sort it out for myself.
I'm in the early phase of testing a Raspberry Pi 4 running OPENBuilds CONTROL with a blackbox. Thus far I've been able to successfully install the CONTROL software and it is successfuflly communicating with the black box. I can home without errors, I can jog as expected. I have more modifications and testing I need to do before I run a job but thus far it looks like a Raspberry Pi 4 may have sufficient processing power and memory to run CONTROL well. At least I have not hit any immediate issues with it.
Load up a finishing pass job out of Vectric, with >1million lines. See if starts choking later on in the job. That's where the Pi3 choked too much
Thanks Peter, I'll give that a try once I get everything dialed in again. Good to have criteria for an adequate test. If I run into issues running of off an SD card for the storage I may throw in a spare SSD as the main drive now that the Pi supports USB 3.0. That could improve performance quite a bit as well.
Good to know as well. Hopefully the faster RAM in the Pi 4, and the fact that the version I'm running has 4x the amount of memory will make all of the difference.
For sure. The 3D viewer can easily use 3-4gb of ram for a 25-30mb gcode file for WebGL (threejs) object.
I've gotten though checking things to the point that I'm confident that movement is working as expected. In order to stress test CONTROL on the Pi, I'm assuming I could air cut a complex file and still stress the software in the same manner as it would if I were actually cutting the part. If that is true, should I be able to just grab some 3d carving examples from the projects portion of site to use? I tried a 3d carving (Mushroom Man), but I'm getting stuck pulling the dxf file into OpenBuilds CAM. The file was originally in *.stl format but I converted to *.dxf. I'm wondering if the file too big for OpenBuilds CAM, the *.dxf file looks to be ~128MB. When I attempt to open the file CAM hangs and eventually reloads itself.
Grab a trial of Vectric and throw a high vertice count STL into it, like the Old Man Splat one from thingiverse OpenBuilds CAM is a 2.5D starter CAM, wont make big enough files to really stress it. Vectric and Fusion (with smoothing turned off) are the big ones
I finally got the Aspire trial loaded, but I'm running into issues trying to save the tool paths. When I attempt to save the toolpath it is giving me a message that the trial version can only save toolpaths from the tutorial models. Would any of the tutorial models be of sufficient complexity for our test?
I have been struggling getting my Pi 4 to work. I can get the GUI to launch, but I cant seem to get it to connect to the blackbox. I shows "Waiting for USB" (greyed out).. so it looks like it cant enumerate the virtual com port for some reason. If I "lsusb", I do see the Ltd FT232 Serial (UART) is recognized by the OS. Do you have any tips on how you got your Pi4 to work?
I just followed the instructions in this link. OpenBuilds/OpenBuilds-CONTROL If you've already followed those I'm not certain why it would be showing up off the top of my head. I'll see if I can poke around sometime again soon and see if I can figure out what might be causing your issue.
yes, my user is a member of dialout. i can open the serial port fine without any privilege elevation (ie i can just open the serial port and talk directly to grbl repl) the only place i did sway from the docs... i think my version of buster is newer than the release date that is outlined in the doc.
Check the devtools console (ctrl+shift+i in chrome) for any errors, maybe the backend has found the ports just fine but its not updating the frontend?
no errors when I inspect. I started over. This time I actually followed the wiki verbatim. Meaning, this time I started with the base image Index of /raspbian/images/raspbian-2019-07-12 as called out specifically in the wiki. Its working. I was using a newer release. Maybe I just jonesed it.. twice. anyway.. take away: follow the directions Thanks, Peter. Thanks, Paul
hi, I just got a raspberry Pi400 and have been unable to load the openbuilds with black box into the Pi. any help will great
Officially Pi is not a supported platform for OpenBuilds CONTROL Unofficially, instructions exists here OpenBuilds/OpenBuilds-CONTROL but NB comes with no tech support - you are on your own.
Peter pointed you to the wiki. Follow it exactly and use the same raspbian base image that is called out in the wiki. The Pi400 is based on the pi4, and I was able to get it to work on the pi4. I had trouble initially too but I was using the latest version of raspbian. I tried again but this time used the same version of raspbian that is called out in the wiki and I got it working. Fluke? maybe. Just follow the directions verbatim and it should work.
And if you find the Wiki to be outdated, its up to the community to let me know what to change - or persuade me to spend some of my weekend time figuring it out (;
Seems like a fair few of us would love to use the Pi4..... Now that there is an 8gb variant as well might be worth the time.
Normal users + Pi + Linux is a tech support nightmare We rather prefer you checking out INTERFACE CNC Touch Controller
