GRBL Arduino Connector Shield

This shield plugs into a standard Arduino, such as the Uno with the Arduino pins connected to a 26 pin IDE dual inline socket. A ribbon cable with a 26 pin IDE on one end and a DB 25 pin IDE on the other can be used to connect the shield to a typical breakout board. The pinout is chosen to match the SainSmart ST-V6 breakout though it may match others. The DB pins for the X,Y,Z and A are pretty standard. The Enable is normally on pin 1, but some have it on 14.

The schematic shown below includes a complete pinout for the DB, IDE and Arduino. The schematic was done with the free schematic capture program, TinyCad.

Arduino GRBL Connector shield schematic using TinyCad

In this blog we will include a breakout of our own design with connectors instead of terminal blocks and a driver board using Pololu type driver plugins. Both will use the 25 pin DB male connector even though many USA made breakout designs use a female connector.