Just sent the following to support@carbide3d.com:
Hi!
First of all, thanks for making the Shapeoken (is that the right plural?). I got the 4x4 and it’s my first CNC machine. It’s been an awesome journey adding CNC to my repertoire. I’ve been a software engineer and hardware engineer professionally for a few decades and also spent a bit of time woodworking and 3d printing. CNC was the next frontier I wanted to explore and the Shapeoko has made it very approachable and easy to learn.
As I expanded beyond Carbide Create and Motion, I ran into an issue. There’s a community thread here, but the short version is that many modeling tools, including the Carbide 3d Post Processor for Fusion 360, put comments in the GCode file. When those comments are passed to the CNC machine it causes the CNC machine to lock up completely because of a bug in the Shapeoko firmware. The reason you may not have seen this is because Carbide Motion strips those comments out of the GCode and doesn’t send them to the CNC machine, but that’s a very non-standard way to handle GCode. Every other tool like CNCJS, GCodeSender, and Mach3 pass those comments to the Shapeoko directly and lock up the machine.
I’m sure the Carbide 3d developers will fix the bug and provide an updated firmware when they get time to do so. Unfortunately, it’s been 6 weeks since the team was made aware of the problem in this post on May 29.
There’s one additional layer of complexity to address. The Shapeoko firmware is based on an open source project called GRBL. The Carbide 3d developers modified the GRBL source code to make it work better on the Shapeoko, which apparently introduced this bug. The beauty of the GRBL project being open source is that it allows software engineers from all over the world to fix bugs and contribute those fixes back to the community. That’s not possible in this case because Carbide 3d hasn’t provided the modified source code as required by the GRBL license. That means nobody except Carbide 3d can fix this so we’re stuck waiting for the Carbide 3d developers to find the time.
I’ll spare you any philosophical speeches on open source, but will briefly point out that Carbide 3d has benefitted massively from the work of the GRBL project. The Shapeoko firmware is based entirely on the code written by Sonny Jeon, a PHD astrophysicist and Aerospace Engineer at MIT, plus 26 other contributors. It’s unlikely Carbide 3d could exist without that team of engineers providing all of their work for free. Carbide 3d received all of that value without paying anything and is free to use GRBL to create a business. The agreement only has one major stipulation: Those who modify the GRBL software are required to publish their source code under the same agreement.
Now that you’re aware, I’ll ask you to please publish the Shapeoko 5 Pro firmware source code. It will benefit you as a company because people like me will be able to fix bugs like this much faster than your own developers. You’ll get those contributions and improvements for free. In addition, you’ll be in compliance with the GPLv3 license that GRBL is provided under. I’m assuming your engineers use some form of source control and there’s a good chance it’s a private GitHub repository already. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to publish that repository publicly.
Thanks!
Ryan Steckler
gotcode@gmail.com