Hey everyone!
It’s been a little while since we’ve talked about what’s going on under the hood of the SuperLongBoard (SLB), and today we’ve got some exciting news for those of you who like to live on the bleeding edge.
We are looking for a small group of AltMill and LongMill owners to help us beta test the new “Main” version of the grblHAL firmware.
If you’re interested in helping us test this out, you can fill out the Google Form linked at the bottom of this post. But first, a little history lesson on how we got here, why this change matters, and what you can expect.
A Quick History Lesson: SienciHAL vs. Main
When we first launched the SLB, we made the decision to fork the firmware into our own specific flavour, which we affectionately called “SienciHAL.”
At the time, we needed to make sure the firmware was rock-solid and perfectly tailored to the specific hardware we were building. We needed to guarantee stability for our users right out of the gate, and having our own branch allowed us to lock things down and ensure everything behaved exactly how we wanted it to for launch.
However, maintaining a separate fork means you miss out on all the cool new stuff happening in the wider world of grblHAL development. Over the last year, we’ve been working closely with the original creator of grblHAL (Terje) and the community to bring our specific needs and features into the Main branch of the firmware.
Our goal has always been to contribute to the open-source ecosystem, not just take from it. By working to get our changes merged into the main project, we ensure that the SLB remains compatible with future developments while being able to contribute any potential improvements back to the community.
What’s New in this Firmware?
For the most part, if we’ve done our job right, you won’t notice a huge difference in how your machine cuts. The motion and reliability should feel just as solid as before. However, moving to the Main branch unlocks some nice quality-of-life improvements and future-proofing features – examples being:
Automatic Motor Alarm Reset: One of the small but mighty changes. It makes recovering from motor alarms much smoother without needing to power cycle or mash reset buttons as frantically.
SD Card Support: We are unlocking support for SD card reading, which opens the door for running files directly from the board and other advanced standalone features down the road.
Advanced Plugin Support: This firmware includes support for the plugins we’ve developed for our ATC (Automatic Tool Changer) spindle. We also hope that these features will be helpful for anyone setting up their own automatic tool change system on any machine running grblHAL.
Under-the-hood Tweaks: A lot of small improvements to stability and code efficiency that come from the collective brainpower of the open-source community. This firmware version also exposes the ability to change many other settings and features such as LED brightness and ‘jerk’ motion control.
Who Should Test This? (And Who Shouldn’t)
We are looking for AltMill and LongMill users who are relatively comfortable with flashing firmware and using gSender.
This is beta firmware. While it has been tested to the best of our abilities and equipment, there is naturally a risk of bugs or unexpected behaviour.
It is not recommended to participate in beta testing if you’re in the middle of a critical production run or have a deadline to meet.
DO sign up if you enjoy tinkering, don’t mind providing feedback, and want to help us polish the next generation of our software stack!
For Interested Beta Testers
If you’re interested in beta testing, please fill out the Google Form below. We will be selecting a limited number of users to start with to ensure we can provide adequate support and gather focused feedback. If selected, we’ll email you the firmware file and instructions on how to flash it to your SLB.
For Everyone Else Interested
For anyone interested in upgrading without beta testing, an officially supported public release of the new grblHAL main firmware will be made available in the coming months, shipping with new machines as well. We will announce this in a subsequent blog post and on social posts.
We’ve also been working to coordinate to have a ‘Webbuilder’ accessible grblHAL machine profile accessible that will allow advanced users to configure their version of this firmware any way they’d like to.
We are incredibly grateful for open-source projects like grblHAL. They are the backbone of what makes affordable, high-performance CNC machining possible for hobbyists and small businesses. We want to do our part to support and contribute to these projects wherever possible, and moving our users to the Main branch is a huge step in that direction.