STATUS UPDATE:
After much noodling, I am taking a slight detour.
The GF has a lot of bespoke hardware that complicates the design of a “simple” adapter that would let you connect it to one of the many generic controllers on the market. The main hurdles are the cameras and the laser head. There is just no easy way to expose these to a generic controller, as there isn’t a single one that supports either. This would result in some sort of hybrid arrangement where there is a controller of some sort on the adapter that provides an interface for these specific components. That ends up requiring a web panel you interact with to get access to them (and other device features). This quickly ceases to be a “simple” adapter.
Not being a simple adapter is fair enough, but it quickly leads me down the same road I went before—with a whole new control board. I learned from that effort that there just wasn’t any real interest in that. At least, not enough interest to make the effort worth it.
That led me right back to where I left off last time: custom firmware for the factory control board that provides a GRBL interface so you can run the GF with your tool of choice. Some people on other forums mistakenly suggest that the reason the project ended was because it couldn’t be done. That is dead wrong. It was just a lot of work, and I lost interest in continuing it. What I had accomplished was an initial port of GRBL to work with the SDMA hardware in the GF (the same hardware component GF uses for their motion output). That was somewhat functional, but it needed a lot of work to dial in the timings and get all the kinks worked out. It was tedious.
Times have changed since then. A well-established port of GRBL with a hardware abstraction layer has now emerged. It effectively modularized the architecture and made it much easier to adapt for different hardware. There is even a port to the venerable RP2040 that does a somewhat similar implementation to the iMX6 the GF uses. Also, the advances in AI coding agents (something unheard of just six years ago) have become a force multiplier for me. While far from perfect and still needing a lot of guidance, they have taken over the tedium and let me focus on what is important.
These developments have led me in a new direction: finishing the Forgefirm concept. A custom firmware image that will run on factory control boards and provide a GRBL-compatible interface with an additional instruction set to control GF-specific hardware. There will also be a web interface to see the status of the hardware, provide streams from the cameras, and allow the user to tweak the settings of the machine.
I have completed a significant amount of the needed groundwork. I have updated Forgefirm to work with the latest LTS kernel and Yocto release. The GF kernel module has been updated to handle the numerous changes between the old and new kernels. My Python libraries have been updated to work with the driver changes and the latest GF cloud API (you can still use their web app with the new firmware if you like). And most importantly, I have a grblHAL hardware component that drives the GF hardware.
The full solution is not yet ready for release, as I am still working through validation and tweaking. But it is coming along nicely. I can currently control and run the GF with LightBurn (motion only—I’ll light the laser when I have 100% confidence in the motion). When the firmware is ready for release, it will still require you to break out your soldering iron to install it, as you will need console access. Maybe someday in the not-so-distant future we can convince GF to sign third-party firmware images so they can be installed via their local recovery mechanism (it exists—it uses the same tooling as the initial setup process).
I know there are other issues with the GF that this direction seemingly will not solve, like dead power supplies and the lack of expansion for connecting things like rotary drives. Well, I have good news… I will be releasing an adapter that will allow you to connect third-party power supplies. This will only work with Forgefirm, as the factory firmware expects feedback from the bespoke power supply and won’t work without it. Additionally, I will be releasing an I/O expansion board that will enable driving of external devices like rotary drives and adding homing sensors.
I don’t have a solid timeline for the release of any of these things, as the time I can dedicate to this is hard to predict. Hopefully another month or so… Stay tuned.
. Also, although you haven’t mentioned it, would be happy to donate $ to help offset costs…
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