Here at SainSmart, we do our best to make sure our CNC's are sent to the customer ready to use after some easy assembly and software installation. Learning to use a CNC can be hard enough for customers who have no prior experience with subtraction manufacturing, so we put special attention into something called Firmware which is a semi-permanent software programmed into a read-only memory on the electronics that drive your CNC.
The Firmware, a customized version of the Open Source GRBL in this case, is loaded with safety features and hard limitations on things like maximum speed and acceleration settings which are optimized in such a way to provide as safe a learning experience as possible for our users.
Much of this is largely set in stone unless the user goes to great lengths to rewrite our Firmware with that from another source. That being said, there are variables within the Firmware called Parameters which can be modified with relative ease by more advanced users to tune their CNC's in order to maximize it's performance.
To see what your Parameters are set at, you have to connect your CNC to a computer, and type $$ into the console of your CNC controller software, such as Candle, UGS or bCNC. When you do, you will see something like this:
While typing $$ only shows you a list of current settings, but then you can take a setting, lets say (as an example) $110 and type $110=5000 into the console and that will automatically change the setting.
Those numbers can be confusing, and it's hard for even some advanced users to understand what they mean, and what effect a change would have on their CNC. That's what this guide is for!
Based on the work of Graham Bland, a member of our community, this tutorial will tell you what settings are worth changing, and why, in order to maximize your CNC's performance.
You can follow the tutorial here, and please leave any questions or comments down below!
not sure why above tuning your grbl list left out $30, $31 ,and $32 all are important ?