WebControl On Chromebook?

I’ve recent decided I want to keep my chromebook in my garage, and figured I’d try again to get ground control going. I was able to get ground control going, but everything moves at a crawl compared to running on my windows computer.

This led to me wanting to try WebControl. I am not able to connect to localhost:5001 or 5000…has anyone successfully gotten WebControl running on a chromebook?

This laptop is going to become target in the backyard soon if I can’t find a good use for this laptop.

the easy (i.e. best supported) thing to do would be to get a Pi to run
WebControl on and use the browser on the Chromebook to access it.

If you do want to run WebControl on the Chromebook we would first need to find
which processor you have there (if you can get a terminal open, cat
/proc/cpuinfo and report what it returns, at least for the last core)

then we can tell you hich version to download and try to run

If you did download it, try running it from a terminal window and tell us if it
reports any errors.

David Lang

Dlang,

Thank you for the reply. I had been trying the single directory, but just tried the single file.
From there I was able to make the file executable and get it to work.

I’ll update tomorrow once I hook it up to the unit and see if I can operate everything.

What model Chromebook is this and which file specific file did you download? Rpi/Linux/win?

It’s an Acer CB3-532-C8DF, and I’m using the Linux single file.

I’m about to go downstairs now and see how the speed looks

The final answer is that it’ll work, but it extremely slow. I was desperately trying to give this Chromebook a purpose, but it seems it doesn’t have the power to do much.

That’s honestly surprising. Is it just ‘laggy’? I thought it would be fast enough to handle it. Is there any other process going on in the background that could be consuming CPU cycles? I’ve never used a chromebook before so don’t know what you can do to tell.

Is it slow as in the machine responds slowly, or slow as in the UI is lagging?

It is slow as in the machine responds slowly…it seems almost as if the command from the computer to Arduino is slow. It’s quite strange because when manually controlling the sled everything is completely normal, but a few hundred lines into a project it’s like it finally overloads itself and starts taking a few seconds per line of g-code.

Interesting… I don’t know what would cause that to happen that’s related specifically to webcontrol and not the OS. Do you have buffer gcode enabled? If so, try disabling it. If not, try enabling it.

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how did you get the single file to execute? I got the linux terminal up on my chromebook, downloaded the linux single file. but not sure how to execute it.

well i mashed enough incorrect commands into terminal that I finally found the right one to start web control. Its up but when I try to select a port to communicate with the arduino it doesn’t show any ports after refreshing.

Looks like I just needed to let the OS update, It had been turned off for nearly a year.
Its a lenovo yoga 11e and is running webcontrol well. No issues so far, so running off of a chromebook is an option, but may just depend on what chromebook it is.

  • Update Chrome
  • Enable linux in the settings
  • Enable usb access in the linux advanced settings
  • Open the linux terminal and use the command lines that are listed on the git page for installing to linux.
  • Change the path to the latest singlefile release
  • use ./main to start up the webcontrol service.
  • If the browser doesn’t load webcontrol when it opens try localhost:5000 as the url
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Jared, I haven’t logged on in awhile… So I apologize for the late reply.

I ended up using an RPI4 and controlling it from my chrome book