Kickstarter Update!

It has been a while that I wrote a blog about my K40 but many things were in train to fulfil the Kickstarter for my K40 Controller called Gerbil (after the firmware ‘Grbl’). The news is that the K40 shields are assembled and delivered to my fulfilment partner Skyzer Technologies and the remaining Gerbil controllers are earmarked for delivery to Skyzer at the end of this week (14-20 October).

PCBways did send me some photos:

 

Top side of the controller
Bottom side of the controller
The K40 shield test assembly run.
The box with shields!
Nicely individually packed for shipping

The Plugins

The holy grail was to implement the streaming of the G code inside the Inkscape Plugins. Since all extensions are written in Python, it should not be difficult to implement an existing g-code streaming feature written in Python. Easier said than done, but I managed to achieve it. The biggest hurdle was that Inkscape crashed after streaming which was caused by a rouge python print command which is not supported by Inkscape. All good and the Plugins are available here.

Further is the firmware available on Github as well here and here

. The firmware does come with a boot firmware burner (A specific usb bootloader called ‘Optoboot‘ for the 328PB) so once flashed for the first time at Skyzer, you are able upgrade the firmware in the future via the Arduino IDE (and over the serial port without an external burner).

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