When you are ready to add additional axis to your GRBL CNC system, the F16 is the upgrade of choice. With 6-axis of coordinated motion and faster pulse rate, it is now possible increase step resolution without sacrificing feed rate.

The F16 is running GRBL32 (an upgrade from the popular GRBL firmware running on an Arduino 328p processor). The GRBL32 firmware is a fork from GRBL version 1.1f, running on the 32-bit STM32F103 (aka “bluepill”). With a 32-bit Arm Cortex-M3 core overclocked to 96MHz, the STM32F103 is much faster than the 8-bit Arduino 328p running at 16MHz.  At 20kB RAM and 64kB flash, STM32F103 has 10 times the RAM and twice the flash, allowing many enhancements to the core GRBL.

F16 enhanced GRBL32 features:

1. 6-axis of coordinated motion (up from 3). The axis are: XYZ ABC.
2. Up to 150KHz pulse rate for each axis while under 6-axis coordinated motion, 225KHz max pulse rate when running 3-axis or less (up from 30KHz for Arduino based GRBL).
3. Smoother Acceleration/Deceleration (0.2 ms accel/decel step).
4. 96MHz timer for flexible PWM output control. Default is 10KHz PWM at better than 13-bit resolution : 9600 steps in the 0 to 5V range.
5. Multiple connectivity options: USB (onboard CH340), External UART, WiFi (ESP-01), or Raspberry Pi Zero W (WiFi). Running at 921600 baud-rate (115200 firmware available).
6. One AUX TTL output (M-Code control: M62/M63)
7. Custom Acceleration Scaling (custom M-Code control: M100), allowing in code changes of the acceleration parameter for each axis individually.

See here for standard GRBL features.

User’s Manual.

Accessories:

• External Driver Jumper (ED1)
• ST-Link V2 Programmer
• WiFi Module (ESP-01)
• Raspberry Pi Zero W

Demo Video