Shapeoko 3 Z axis Meltdown

I tried to do some cutting tonight and ~2 hours into the job my shapeoko disconnected from the computer. I powered everything down and could smell burning electronics. Looking at the control board I found that the Z axis motor drive is melted.

I have very minimal run time on my shapeoko because i’m just too busy at work to play with it. Any idea what could have caused this to happen?

  • I was cutting poplar, and looking at where everything stopped, the Z axis was only holding position not plunging up/down, since it was cutting in the X/Y axis.
  • I have the ‘suckit’ dust boot attached and I think it does a very good job of keeping dust/chips at bay so I don’t think much could have got inside the control board to short things out…
  • Maybe this is a heat issue? It was running in a room at ~22C which should be okay?
  • I did check the movement of the Z axis and it raised and lowers down to the current cutting depth without any issue.

Open to any ideas that may point me at the source of the problem… little nervous to just buy a replacement board if the problem is just going to happen again.

image5

Bummer.

Your best bet is to contact Carbide 3D support. mailto:support@carbide3d.com

They will make things right.

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What Griff said. Contact carbide support they will make things right.

No idea what happened, but after something similar happened to me in the first few weeks of using my SO3, after getting a replacement board (which happened lightning fast after I contacted carbide support), for the sake of my own piece of mind I added a small heatsink on each of my stepper drivers. No problem ever since (but 99.9% of SO3 users do not have those, do long jobs, and it works just fine…drivers do not heat up much if the controller board is properly mounted, see here for my measurements)

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Wow, I am really surprised. I have been running my machine HARD for years, and no problem. Your burnt board is VERY RARE. In fact, it’s the first time I have seen one.

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Here’s a second one, so that’s two of us (yet I completely agree this seems to be a very rare event)

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Thanks for the quick responses. I contacted the support team and they sent back a link to a hidden page on the website that would let me purchase a new board.

Also appreciate the links. I checked out those forums. Very interesting stuff…

Hello again everyone.

I popped in a new control board and everything on the Shapeoko appears to function again. Woohoo! Doesn’t really help me figure out what happened, but i’ll settle for working again.

Before i start using it, is there any settings etc that I should be loading into a brand new board? I was able to run the homing cycle, I’m just not sure if i have to actually configure it as a S3 vs S3xL vs S3xxL or anything like that? I did some rapid moves with my figure on the power bar and everything moved as expected.

Also I was mid job when everything stopped. I sent the S3 to current offset X/Y and it actually looks like it went to the correct spot to start the job… how is that possible? Are these offset values saved on my laptop not the S3 controller… meaning I am safe to actually continue running my previous job? That would be super cool.

Thanks for the info everyone. The help on this forum is amazing.

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Yes, you should reconfigure the machine — if Carbide Motion has a stored offset you’d like to take advantage of, note the offset of it from the machine origin so that you can reset it if you wish.

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