The GRBL Project

Starting around 2014, a number of software developers independently recognized that 8-bit GRBL had reached it's limits on the Arduino. They set their sights on porting it to one of a number of the emerging, inexpensive 32-bit machines, especially ARM based microcontrollers. While these ports worked, they threatened to cause fragmentation of the GRBL world. Because GRBL was so finely honed to take efficient advantage of the Arduino's Atmel microcontroller, machine specific code was intermingled with machine independent code and made it difficult to port. Also, any new features added or bugs fixed in one version would have to be retrofitted to other ports. Very quickly there were new features in one port that weren't available in others. There was no master source that all the different 32-bit versions could be built from. Moving to a new microcontroller or even a different variant in the same family required an in-depth understanding of the workings of GRBL.

Terje Io, a talented and forward looking Norwegian software developer, saw this and started work on a solution to the problem. He split GRBL into two parts: one that contains all the processor dependent code - a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) and one that does not - the GRBL core. Thus, grblHAL was born. The HAL contains code that initializes the processor, knows about timers, PWM hardware, ports, pin addresses, communications and such. The GRBL core only interacts with the HAL. Moving grblHAL to a new microcontroller takes a few weeks or even days in some cases because the HAL layer is relatively small. In addition, bug fixes or new features to the GRBL core can be added for the benefit of all versions.