Z axis buttons for GRBL?

I am setting up a CNC3018 PLUS and I have no desire to have a laptop out in the shop. I successfully connected a Pi and everything works with the GRBL plugin. But there are no buttons for the z axis. Is that something I am going to have to do myself with the custom button plugin?

This forum is all about Octoprint for 3d Printers.
You might get assistance on GRBL at https://forum.makerforums.info/

I thought this forum was for Octoprint and that it didn't discriminate against what you were using it for? I also didn't see anything about the GRBL plugin on the maker site.

I didn't mean to imply that your question wasn't welcome here. just that the Makerforum might be a good place to find people who do more CNC than 3D printing.

From the Better GRBL support plugin's information page, it looks like it hides OctoPrint's control tab and replaces it with its own one, which doesn't have any z controls I guess. In the settings you should be able to disable hiding the control tab and see if it works?

This is a sensible place to post - even though not many people will know about the GRBL plugin, it is specifically an OctoPrint issue which a regular CNC orientated forum probably wouldn't know about.

@paramax55, You could also open an issue on the plugin's home page.

The Home Page! That's what I needed. Thanks! I didn't even know where to start.

If I can get this to function, that will be good enough for me. Buttons would be great, but I could even get by with writing some g-code scripts and uploading those to run instead of buttons. It would get old typing "G91 G0 Z-10" over and over.

Between Charlie and b-morgan, I got it figured out (good enough, anyway). The GRBL plugin does hide the octoprint controls tab and you can un-select that option in the settings. You will have the normal octoprint control tab as well as the GRBL control tab. The jog buttons work in the octoprint tab but some of the other buttons do crazy things. Don't press those. When you create custom buttons, they will show up in the octoprint tab, so you need to be able to see that tab, anyway.

The GRBL tab will let me home the machine and jog the X/Y axes. The octoprint tab will let me jog all three axes and run my custom buttons to probe all three axes or just the z axis. When I get the laser up and running, the GRBL tab has controls for that, too.

1 Like