I want to plug in my drivers from the printer into my Raspberry Pi. I want to control the printer's axes by sending G-code directly from the Raspberry Pi command line (if possible) to the drivers.
Is that possible and if yes does anyone know how? As I stated above without using any 3rd party program/software.
A very dumb, simple way to send GCODE to your printer from the terminal can be achieved with:
echo "gcode here" > /dev/ttyS0
/dev/ttyS0 can vary, It may be /dev/ttyACM0, /dev/ttyUSB0, or any similar with a different number.
You can figure out which path is correct for your printer with the command ls /dev/tty* and comparing the results with your printer plugged in and unplugged, Whichever device pops up new should be your printer.
As well, Some printers may appear in /dev/serial/by-id/ instead of /dev/tty*, so if you can't find your printer normally, try ls /dev/serial/by-id/ instead.
If this doesn't seem to work, you may need to change the serial settings using the command sudo stty -f /dev/ttyS0 115200, replacing /dev/ttyS0 and 115200 to the device path and printer baud rate respectively.
If you are looking for a more bi-directional solution, you can use the command screen, which is usually installed by default. You can use it like this:
screen /dev/ttyS0 115200 and exit by Control+A, then pressing D
Another solution would be the pronsole utility from Printrun/Pronterface, which can be installed using sudo apt install printrun and invoked with pronsole.py and you can then connect to your printer with the syntax
connect /dev/ttyS0 115200 or simply connect, as pronsole has the ability to autoconnect to your printer. Exit with the exit command.
Sending G-code to a printer via a serial interface is a bidirectional operation that requires waiting for acknowledgment from the printer before sending further commands. In theory, this shouldn't be needed and hardware flow control (or even XON/XOFF flow control if the hardware is not available) should be used, but that's not the way things were done. Thus, sending G-code with "dumb" commands like "cat" does not work.
If you want to send individual commands manually, you can use a program like Minicom (or screen's built-in serial terminal support) and process the acknowledgments yourself. But if you want to really stream print jobs, you need at least a minimal program for it. This can be written in a few lines of Python or Perl if you like. I know there are examples of such but I don't have the links handy and haven't tried any of them to be able to recommend one, anyway.
You can send the data to the serial port using echo, but you'll have to use cat to get the response.
