X-Carve: Programming The Arduino Uno

Rather than checking the X-Carve Arduino/gShield Motion Controller Kit option when I bought the X-Carve, I supplied my own Arduino (which I had lying around) and I purchased the gShield with $50 gift card I got for ordering the X-Carve over Black Friday weekend. This saved me $120, minus the shipping cost of the gShield.

Since I didn’t receive my Arduino from Inventables, I had to flash my Arduino with the grbl firmware for controlling the X-Carve. You can follow the instructions here. What follows is some tips I found to make it easier.

1. Make sure you have the Arduino IDE installed. (I’m using 1.6.5)
2. Download the latest source code from GitHub. They tell you the “Download ZIP” button is on the lower right side of the homepage. They are wrong, it is on the far right side just above where they start the listing of the files and directories.
3. Unpack the zip where you want it to go. I like storing all my source on my Google Drive.
4.  When you are including the library in the 3rd step the correct menu option is “Add .ZIP Library.” Then navigate to grbl-master, go down into the next directory which is also named grbl-master. You’ll see three directories, drill down into the grbl directory. When you see three folders named cpu_map, defaults, and examples you can click “Open.”

Everything else seemed to work correctly.