Connecting TinyG

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Connecting to TinyG

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Connecting to TinyG For The First Time

If you are running windows go here: Connecting TinyG to Windows

Installing USB Drivers on OSX

You need to have the FTDI USB driver installed. You may already have one installed if you have been running a pre-Uno Arduino. To try this out skip to the Establishing Connection section. Come back here if you don't find the serial port.

Here are instructions if you need to install the FTDI USB driver.

  1. Download the Virtual Comm Port (VCP) driver for OSX from the FTDI Drivers Page. At the time this was written (7/30/11) the current version was 2.2.16
  2. Find and double click FTDIUSBSerialDriver_v2_2_16.dmg in your Downloads directory. Unless you are running OSX 10.3, click on FTDIUSBSerialDriver_10_4_10_5_10_6. I'm not sure if this works for Lion (10.7)
  3. Follow the default installation instructions
  4. Now when you scan for ports you should find something like usbserial-A700eA28. This should also show up in the /dev directory as something like /dev/tty.usbserial-A700eA28.

Establishing Connection to TinyG with CoolTerm

Install CoolTerm:
Download Links for CoolTerm Below:


(NOTE: We are using the OSX version for the example).


After the board is wired correctly for power and motors, and you have the drivers and CoolTerm installed, connect TinyG to your Mac using a Mini-B USB cable.
Click the Options menu item. CoolTerm should have scanned and found a serial port that looks something like this: usbserial-A700eA28


Serial.png


Note that in windows you will see your serial port will not be the same. It will be more along the lines of COMx. Where is, is a number assigned by the operating system.


If Coolterm does not find the usbserial port (or correct COM in Windows) check power to the TinyG board, the cable, and verify that you have properly installed the correct FTDI VCP USB driver.

Select the following settings in the Options tab. Only those settings that need to be changed are listed:


In the Serial Port window:
Port: 			usbserial-A700eA28 port 	(or similar - your port will have different last 4 or 8 characters)
Baudrate: 		115,200
Flow Control:		XON/XOFF flow control checked

In the Terminal window:
Terminal Mode:		Line mode
Enter Key Emulation	CR

Now hit the Connect button. When you hit CR you should see the TinyG prompt:

 tinyg[mm] ok>

The prompt tells you that the board is responding, and that you are in millimeter mode. To enter inches mode type g20<cr>. To enter mm mode type g21<cr>

You can now enter Gcode lines by hand - e.g. G0 x25, or send a file to the board using the Connection/Send textfile dialog.

Sending Gcode Files to TinyG

The officially supported way of sending files to TinyG is to use the CoolTerm serial terminal emulator program.
Note that you must have XON enabled in the connections settings under coolterm.
To initiate a gcode file transfer in coolterm.
Go to the Connection >> Send Text File>>
From here select a gcode file and click open.

See below: Serialfilecool.png

I have selected the braid gcode file. This file is in the TinyG github repo. Or you can copy and paste from here. You can see a Video of a successful example of Coolterm sending a gcode file to the TinyG board.

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