Contour Shuttle Express to jog a GRBL-controlled CNC @ cncjs

Contour's ShuttleExpress for smoothly jogging a GRBL CNC machine under cncjs and Linux on a RaspberryPi using USB/hidraw

Note: I am an absolute beginner when it comes to nodeJS, JavaScript and even git...

Install

• have your cnc machine 100% working with GRBL and cncjs
• clone or download this repo
• cd into the directory
• run 'npm install'
• copy new udev rule 'sudo cp udev/99-shuttlexpress.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/'
• active new udev rules by rebooting your raspi or 'sudo udevadm control --reload-rules; sudo udevadm trigger'
• setup a rule in cncjs to auto-start the ShuttleExpress pendant like in the animated gif below

Make sure to adjust the path (here '/home/pi/ShuttleExpress/bin/cncjs-pendant-keyboard' in the example) and the name of your GRBL's serial port (here: /dev/ttyACM0) to your own setup.

Usage

Jogging is locked out until you select one of the Axis by pressing one of the three middle buttons. Sequence is 'X', 'Y' and 'Z' from the left.

After selecting the Axis you want to jog you can either use the Shuttle-Wheel or the Dial:

• Shuttle Wheel uses GRBL's great realtime Jog extensions
  • Turning the Shuttle Wheel left will jog towards positive coordinates, to the right will jog into negative coordinate direction
    • Speed of Jogging depends on how far you turn the wheel. Default is 5x the number of ticks that you turn the dial in mm/s
      • Example: Turning the wheel 5 ticks to the left will jog your selected axis with 25mm/s, 7 ticks to the right jogs -35mm/s
      • If you want to change this you can simply edit the line below in {yourpath}/bin/cncjs-pendant-keyboard

      const JOG_SPEEDUP = 5
      

  • Releasing the Shuttle Wheel to its center position will immedately cancel all jog commands queued by GRBL and stop your machine
• Turn the Dial left will jog towards more positive coordinates, to the right will jog into negative coordinate direction
  • Turning the dial wothout any buttons pressed will jog by 0.01mm per tick
  • Keeping the leftmost button pressed while turing the dial will jog by 10x 0.01mm = 0.1mm per tick
  • Keeping the rightmost button pressed while turing the dial will jog by 100x 0.01mm = 1mm per tick

Video showing jogging my CNC machine with Shuttle Express in action