// the find
svenhb/GRBL-Plotter
A GCode sender (not only for lasers or plotters) for up to two GRBL controller. SVG, DXF, HPGL import. 6 axis DRO.
GRBL-Plotter is a Windows GUI application for sending GCode to GRBL-based CNC controllers, with built-in import from SVG, DXF, HPGL, and several other formats. It targets hobbyists running laser cutters, pen plotters, and small CNC mills on GRBL firmware. The feature set is unusually wide for a one-person project — this is clearly built by someone who actually uses the machine.
The import pipeline is genuinely good: SVG via drag-and-drop including URLs, DXF, HPGL, Gerber, drill files, and even CSV — most competing senders handle one or two of these. Tangential knife compensation and drag tool compensation are niche features that are hard to find elsewhere and critical for vinyl cutters. The dual-controller support (two independent GRBL serial connections) solves a real hardware problem for people running a tool changer or a separate rotary axis. Active maintenance with a push as recently as June 2026 and 200+ forks signals a real user base, not abandonware.
Targets .NET 4.0 on Windows — there is no path to Linux or macOS without Mono hacks, and .NET 4.0 is 15 years old. The DLLs are checked in as binaries in the repo (AForge, SharpDX, QRCoder) with no package manager, which makes auditing and updating dependencies painful. The codebase is a single monolithic WinForms project with no tests visible; the MainForm is split across a dozen partial-class files, which is a maintenance smell that will bite contributors. Gerber import is explicitly described as 'rough implementation', which is a polite way of saying it is probably broken for anything non-trivial.