4 axis with Black Box

You're correct. Nothing inherently to do with the BlackBox, it's running standard 8-bit grbl which cannot do more than three axes, it's at the absolute limit of the Arduino Uno hardware involved. There are a bunch of ports of grbl that people seem to like, like grbl-Mega5X, grbl_Esp32, etc.

There's an unofficial 32-bit grbl which has 4-axis motion off the shelf. What sender you have to use, I'm not sure, but that's probably the easiest option. No meaningful information forthcoming yet from the people who know what's going on, though. Unless it's going to be proprietory to hardware vendor supporters, which would be... Kinda gross. But I have no idea what's going on there.

grblHAL is another grbl port that quite a few people seem to be considering a de facto official 32-bit grbl until (and if) Sonny releases whatever he's been working on, and then I suppose we'll see what happens from there. Runs best on a Teensy 4.1 and @phil from seattle makes a breakout board for it. bCNC appears to officially (exclusively, now?) support it, which is a great sender for more advanced features, which grblHAL has more of natively too. You may be able to plug that into the BlackBox Muscle board, depending on how the Y1 Y2 leader/follower wiring is done, since it has four drivers on it. Otherwise you would have to buy an extra DM542-type driver for the A axis. This would be slightly cheaper than buying the xPro, more like $100 vs $200, if you use the BlackBox drivers for XYZ. If you have a gantry machine with dual-Y, then it makes sense to keep the BlackBox driving those motors anyway. This is the direction I would go, personally, it makes the most sense right now.

Then if you want particularly advanced features, there's LinuxCNC which I use on a couple of my machines, but that's a) more expensive unless you already have a donor PC, and b) a bigger learning project in general. Not worth the time if grbl is already doing everything you need

 

Any update on this? The x32 is capable of true 4th axis machining and the firmware allows it, there is not a really viable way to make it all work without sacrificing an axis. I would like to have the option of keeping all of them working as the controller is designed. Very impractical to have to change axis to x or y and adjust setting to accommodate every time i want to do rotary.

 

I'm sorry, I know your already answered this. I was hoping there would be another way. It seem F360 is my only choice for a cam that i have found. I guess its time to step up and go to school on it.

 

Im not finding a grblhal post in fusiion 360. Please advise

 

any idea when this may be available?