Chad Krause

A small blog about my projects

FINALLY! Fusion 360 RS-232 Serial

Autodesk Fusion 360 is an excellent program. A single program to do almost everything you need to machine parts. Drawings, Modeling, and a really nice CAM system! The one thing it doesn't have is a way to communicate with older machines.

My friend's shop has an older Fadal machine that doesn't have any USB ports. In order to send programs to it from fusion, they had to open up their old CAM program and import the G-code, then send it using the old CAM program.

Competitors, such as GibbsCAM or MasterCAM, have had RS 232 features for years!

Well, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I made an add-in for Fusion 360 that sends programs to CNC machines via RS-232 serial. I call it - Serial to CNC. Clever, I know. This app was just published on 5/12/2020 at 3:00am and I'm very excited to see people use it.

If you are interested in using this program it, buy and install from the Autodesk App Store! https://apps.autodesk.com/FUSION/en/Detail/Index?id=2766335624087320601&appLang=en&os=Win64

The add-in is only $10!

To make this, I had to learn how to make add-ins for Fusion 360, and also re-learn Python since it's been a few years since I made anything cool with it. Fusion 360 is tough to develop for - especially on a Mac. It became a lot easier when I built my new PC.

Anyways, I hope this add-in helps out a bunch of people looking for this missing feature! It sure helped my friend and his shop!

If you need support, please email chad@chadkrause.com






All comments

  • Kyle Hayes 1 year ago
    Hello Chad, Thank you for putting in the time & effort to develop this add-in as it fills a major hole in Fusion's capability. This is especially helpful for small shops such as mine who are exclusively running pre-usb and, in some cases, pre-floppy drive machines. One thig I am curious about is whether you are able to set this up to drip feed the CNC rather than simply transferring the file. If that is the case, that is wonderful. If not, you may be able to set that up & charge a small subscription fee for the capability. Please let me know if this is in the current capabilities or in the works. Thank you, Kyle

  • Diego Romero Valladares 1 year ago
    Hello Chad. I'm Diego from Chile. I need to connect a CNC router machine for wood with Fusion360 and manage to pass a direct CNC program to the machine via RS232. The model of my machine is brand MULTICAM model series 1000 Link: http://www.cnc-service.lv/f/1000-R.pdf . My machine has an RS-232 DB9 connector. Is your application compatible with my machine?. Thank you very much for your help. Diego R.

  • Richard Turner 2 years ago
    I just download this software, and it is not finding/seeing all my serials ports that I use for my RS232 communications with my machines. Other programs such as HSM Editor & Cimco Editor & ProDNC see my serial ports without any issues. Any ideas why not?

  • is it possible to run a 3dprinter bord from it ? marlin software compatible ?