Skydog

[karaelena]

Traditional motion controllers (GRBL, TinyG, Smoothie, Marlin, LinuxCNC (or MachineKit) & Mach3 all have the ability to output stepgen pulses required to move the steppers (specifically to tell the stepper drivers which direction and how long). The glowforge does not have this. The Glowforge ‘cloud’ create these and outputs a waveform in which the glowforge ‘plays’ locally. So think of a 10 channel MP3 (each channel is some form of I/O - i.e. one channel for X Axis Step, another channel for X Axis direction, another channel for PWM for the Laser, another channel for the exhaust fan etc…)

What you described is the stepper driver. Not the thing that tells the stepper drive what to do.

This was all discussed here

We’ll release a GPL-licensed firmware for Glowforge

Bingo. We do both CAM and motion planning in the cloud. We just send the machine the actual waveforms to be fed to the motors (X, Y, each fan, focus, etc), laser, chiller, etc. There’s a bit of decompression and then the uP sprays the results at the right I/O lines. Not being constrained by g-code opens some pretty cool doors in terms of what’s possible… much of that will be behind the scenes, though.