/axCutHost

axCutHost

Primary LanguageHTMLGNU General Public License v3.0GPL-3.0

axCutHost

A client/server host control and GCode generation tool originally developed for the axCut laser cutter, but now being reworked into a more generic tool. Works in partnership with the Marlin_for_axCut firmware.

Features

  • Full featured web UI - access from any modern device (laptop, tablet, phone)
  • Headless host control (designed to run on a RPi or similar)
  • Comprehensive manual control, GCode with command reference & ability to include custom GCode routines
  • Material library - defining cut settings for various cut types
  • Import SVG files to generate G-Code, auto mapping colors to cut-types for a selected material
  • Sophisticated path optimisation to minimise job time
  • Automatic sequencing of cuts for interior shapes (i.e. remove cutouts first)
  • GCode editor, with realtime visualition and simulation
  • Suite of extensible calibration wizards for use in setup or testing new materials
  • Power Map - dynamically vary the power levels across the laser bed to compensate for beam divergence, etc (useful for large format machines)
  • Live status update and time-remaining feedback from the laser cutter
  • Pause/resume and Abort functions

System Architecture

  • UI - Fat web client (javascript, etc), with AJAX driven comms to/from web server
  • Web server / serial control - Python-based server-side, using embedded bottle.py web server and serial communication to laser cutter
  • Marlin-based firmware - communicates G/M-codes in plain text over serial link, protected by enhanced CRC16 error detection

Launching the Host

The Python-based host includes a lightweight web-server (bottle.py) and has no external library dependencies, launching it is as simple as:

  1. clone the repo
  2. terminal to the root directory
  3. execute run.sh
  4. navigate to http://localhost:4444 (Chrome browser recommended)