Hi FreeCad community. I am a long time CAD designer and CAM programmer. Since retirement I have gotten into wood working with CNC routers. I have two machines with GRBL controllers. GRBL is not capable of canned cycles and so it is necessary to edit the code for drilling operations. This can become tedious and time consuming. I’ve dabbled in FreeCad for a while and have used it to convert mesh files into solids. I read somewhere that FreeCad has an option to translate drilling code to G1/G0 moves for drilling. I’m still pretty new to FreeCad but I just don’t see that option. Is this real or just a rumour? If it is real is there a tutorial for using it?
Many Thanks
Jim Baker
Hi and welcome to the forum!
When setting up the job, you select grbl postprocessor. If you hover there over the input field “Arguments”, you see that there is an additional parameter ‘–translate_drill’.
I wonder why your grbl cannot understand these. Maybe it is time for a firmware upgrade.
Thanks Chris. Perhaps I don’t understand the grbl requirement. I am assuming that grbl doesn’t recognize G81 or G83 and will error. So far the posted code from FreeCad includes G81. I did include the “–translate_drill” parameter but then it doesn’t successfully post a file. I’m sure I am missing something. I installed 0.20.1 this morning.
Jim
As I expected grbl returns an error on the G81. Now I just have to sort out why FreeCad will not post when I add the translate parameter.
Jim
It would be best to upgrade directly to 0.21 for two reasons: There have improvements been made to Path workbench. And the internal structure has changed recently. There is a script transforming old jobs to new ones, but I would rather recommend to directly use the new way, just to be future proof.
The “original” grbl was for 8 bit microcontrollers and the project did a lot of clever work to squeeze in most grbl features, but not canned drill cycles and others mentioned here
While grbl and grblMega are pretty stable, there are some known issues and development has halted. Some sites, eg bCNC, recommend grblHAL which is an evolving firmware for 32bit controllers.
I use the ‘–translate_drill’ recommended above and it works well.
Some gcode senders can also do the conversion for you, for example bCNC.
Please chamge ALLCAPS thread title
I was able to successfully post grbl flavour code with drill operations translated to G1/G0 commands in FreeCad 0.18.
My only issue now is that it posts in metric even though I have selected inch units in the general preferences. Is there
a units configuration for the “Path” workbench? I don’t see it yet.
Don’t use 0.18, use 0.21. And do as told above; now look for --inches.
Thanks Chrisb. I would gladly update to 21 if I could find the download. The download page shows that 0.20.1 is the current stable version. I downloaded the beta. I got it working. Fabulous!
You can safely use it. There are very rare occasions when things degrade, regarding functionality as well as error freeness the current developer version is usually the better choice.
Hello Everyone, Good Morning 
I attempted to use the drill pecking G81-G83 and neither were being read by Candle or LaserGrbl though I wrote a manual program of Z axis up & down pecking deeper by 0.1mm at a speed of 20mm per minute. I am however using Freecad .17 as the new graphics needed do not work on my elderly computer Freecad is my preferable Engineering Software and Path has aided in my desire to communicate between Software and Grbl board 3018 mini mill Freecad actually opened my eyes to many other functions I could not imagine Thanks
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