I just bought an old C-Beam that I'm planning to steal parts from for my Tops CNC Heavy that is running the latest GRBL with Dual Axis on the Y axis for self-squaring the gantry as it's quite prone to movement when the steppers are off. This has been working great with my Arduino/CNC Shield-setup, but I was hoping to use the xPro v3 board from the C-Beam as my controller board. Does anyone know if it's possible to configure the xPro v3 with Dual Axis? And if so; how? On my current setup I've added jumpers to bind D12 and D13 to A.STP and A.DIR on the A/Y2 stepper driver, and configured this in GRBL, but I'm not sure how to accomplish this with the xPro v3 board. The GRBL documentation says that you can use either D12/D13 or A3/A4, but I don't see any what of connecting either of these to A/Y2 DIR and STP. Releases · gnea/grbl
Hi Peter, Thanks for getting back to me so quickly! I did take a look at that page, and concluded that briding the A pads was a good start, but wasn't really sure where to go from there. The dual axis configuration in GRBL has two pre-configured setups (DUAL_AXIS_CONFIG_PROTONEER_V3_51 and DUAL_AXIS_CONFIG_CNC_SHIELD_CLONE) and based on the v3 schematics it looks like none of these match. First setup has A.STP and A.DIR wired to pins A4 and A3 respectively while the second setup has A.STP and A.DIR wired to D12 and D13 respectively. The v3 schematics seems to indicate that the xPro v3 has A.STP and A.DIR wired to pins A4 and A5 respectively. Am I reading this correctly? If this is the case it seems to be a simple two-line code-change in GRBL to target the correct pins, but I'm kinda out in deep water here.
Indeed, the schematics looks like a4/5 Worth a test then. Though i will say, even aligning the switches precisely is hard. Autosquaring a skew machine, vs building a square machine, you can guess which i prefer (; letting software fight against a frame thats not built right, sounds like a lot of premature weak and tear
OK, thanks - I'll give it a try and see how it goes! I've noticed that the dual axis / self-squaring feature isn't as widly used as I would have thought, but I don't understand why. Every machine with dual y axis, regardless of how well build it is, should get out of square from time to time when the steppers are disabled? My machine is fairly well built, but with dual z motors / lead screws and a build volume volume of around 750x750 it's fairly easy to bump the X axis on either side and cause the Y axis to get out of square. Before implementing dual axis / self-squaring I was measuring and manually turning the screws from time to time, but having it automatically adjust every time it homes makes a lot more sense to me.
