5Pro Jamming/ Not Initializing

CNC Machines
1

First I’m going to start by saying I have a Shapeoko 3 XL that I purchased at the end of 2019 and I use it all the time, doing things with it has become second nature to me. I love it.

Because I love mine so much, recently, my friend who is in his 70’s pulled the trigger on a 5Pro 2x4 and I’ve been happy to help him learn and get started…BUT…i feel like i’ve run into some weird instances where I’m like “i have no idea what’s going on with this machine”. Mainly the following:

He’s only had the machine a few weeks now and we’ve run into this problem 3 times. We turn everything on and open Carbide Motion. We connect to cutter. Then we click “initialize” and the machine is stuck but sounds like it’s trying to move. See my video clip:

5Pro Not Initializing

I jumped online to see what I could find and I came across this video:

Carbide3D - The Support Show

In that video he shows how to sort of “fake initialize” the machine by typing in certain commands in the MDI tab (all foreign to me) and I did get the machine to a point where we could run a project. But like I said, we’ve had to do this 3 times recently and I don’t think we should even have to be doing this at all.
When my own older machine has zero issues, it’s frustrating that this newer, “better” machine has weird issues. It’s frustrating enough for me at 46…not to mention helping to teach a new user 30 years my senior to figure this out :man_facepalming:t2:

Any thoughts on why this keeps happening?

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Possible causes are:

  • lubrication: CNC Machine Maintenance
  • mechanical — contact support for guidance on this
  • electronic — either a problem with a homing switch, the wiring, the connectors, or the control board itself, again, support@carbide3d.com will be able to assist

I will note that I’ve had trouble when trying to help folks troubleshoot their SO5s, since the only difficulties I’ve had have been self-inflicted (i.e., the crash which was so hard it knocked my machine out of square), so I have trouble visualizing/anticipating the possible problems since my machine has been essentially trouble-free. I only mention this because once you get over this hurdle, you should be at the same sort of trouble-free operation you would expect.

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