Test GUI for Grbl without Arduino using the Simulator and virtual com port under GNU Linux.

My Arduino is not accabale right now but I wanted to look at a new GUI or gcode sender program for Grbl called SourceRabbit GCode Sender. I already had the simulator compiled and ready to go and the next step was just to find a way to connect both together. I found that the program socat can do just this:

socat -d -d pty,raw,echo=0,link=/tmp/ttyV0 pty,raw,echo=0,link=/tmp/ttyV1

This creates two virtual serial ports with the names /tmp/ttyV0 and /tmp/ttyV1 and connect both together. Now I just need to direct the output and input of Grbl to one of the virtual serial ports:

./grbl_sim -n > /tmp/ttyV0 < /tmp/ttyV0

To test if this works I can use a command line terminal program like miniterm and connect to the other virtual serial port

miniterm.py /tmp/ttyV1

Now that everything is working I can finally test the new SourceRabbit GCode Sender program.

chrubuntu: zram-config is working wonders if ram runs out… no more freezing desktop.

I’m using chrubuntu on a acer 710 since a long time and it works well, but sometime I ran out of ram and the PC freezes, this happens a lot with Chrome if I open multiple tabs. I was just looking for ways to limit Chrome ram uses but stumbled on the zram stuff and it looks like this helps. I was able to open 15 tabs with different pages and no crash.

sudo apt-get install zram-config

That’s it.