Carbide needs programmers?

Being a new customer and owner of this great machine, I am saddened to see so many requests that have never had any action.

Seems like the software needs to go public to github and start getting users to help with these issues.

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They absolutely do!!! It’s ridiculous some of the software problems that exist and don’t get addressed!

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There are plenty of senders that are open source, and open for input. Carbide seems to be doing a pretty good job to me at making some highly accessible tools for their gear. The right answer isn’t always to add something just because you can… I’ve don’t think I’ve seen them leave a true bug without fixing it pretty promptly. You may just be growing out of the software - it’s surely not for everyone, and is fairly limited in it’s overall capabilities, but in my opinion, that’s the only way to make it approachable. Going straight from “zero” to something like Fusion360 would be a huge barrier for many, many people. Even things like Mach3/4 can have some pretty steep learning curve (Seriously…who when just getting started with this would have any idea what “G54” means when listed as a mode? G38.2? Retract height vs safety height?)

-I- think the carbide guys strike a pretty good balance. They’re small, they’re not a $1B corporation, they’re just guys like you and me, making cool stuff. If you think something is missing, I’m sure they’re open to seeing the suggestions, but if you don’t think they’re implementing what you want, there are plenty of other places that can be contributed too, and they’re all part of the greater community.

UGS is pretty popular, has lots of features, runs on pretty much anything, and fully open. It’s been a pretty popular alternative to carbide motion, but there are others.
GRBL is already open, and is the “guts” of the machine, again, fully open.
There are lots of very capable alternatives to Carbide Create. CC has a pretty limited audience, by design. There are plenty of proprietary (vcarve) non free, open, and proprietary free-ish alternatives, depending on what you want to achieve.

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Type $H and then try and pull a log after that or make any changes to your settings. You have to wait a full day before it will work.
It has been that way since CM 4 has come out and I have mentioned it many times. They need to get the fundamentals right.

Do you have the same issue with V3? V4 is still in beta, you have to go out of your way to use it to begin with.

You’re off into not-what-cm-is-really-intended-for-land here. I suspect you’ll get almost the same behaviour out of any GRBL connected sender. I don’t have access to my machine at the moment to be able to check with another one. The behaviour you’re talking about though I believe is due to the way GRBL works, not CM. GRBL stops talking until the homing is done, it’s like this about most “$” commands. GRBL is fully open, I’m sure the GRBL team would welcome the help in making things like this better.

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It is CM4 not grbl, no problem with CM3. It has been tested on other machines.
They sell probes that only run on cm4, I think beta testing should be over. I get being a small company but how are you going to sell a machine that relies on programming and not have an in house programmer.
I like my machine but …

That’s the thing…the machine -doesn’t- depend on any of these specific tools (you can almost as easily use a different sender, even with their probe), and honestly it doesn’t sound like you’re having problems with the basic jog, zero, probe, send workflows the machine depends on. They -do- have an in house programmer, but Rob has got more than just CM to manage, so I’m willing to cut them some slack.

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I sent mail to support on this volunteering to help program, I was told to help the senders that are already out there like they don’t care if their product gets better.

For-profit companies can’t use ‘volunteer’ labor unless they want folks from a variety of agencies knocking on their door. It was nice to offer but it IS a commercial product even if they provide the result for free. On top of that if you introduce a bug which ends up damaging machines are you also volunteering to remedy the situation with customers?

You may not see a reason why they wouldn’t accept your offer and therefore conclude that the only possible reason is that they “don’t care” but that may just be a lack of insight on your part.

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There will always be something missing. But the majority of people who own S3 are comfortable and we have supported this project. I do not have the knowledge or the experience in GRBL but I have been learning, I need more study to get the best out of my S3, the support from Carbide 3D to my way of seeing has been spectacular, extremely generous and that I liked it a lot . I know that more technical support is needed in this project but I also see that Rob, Jorge and William are working all the time to improve, I have seen it in the number of updates that have been made with CM and CC. I use my machine with pleasure and if there are problems but much less than at the beginning. With this machine I do what I want and things are well done with their exact measurements and if not, the machine adjusted to achieve my job at my need. I also agree with Luke to improve some parts of the hardware and the best thing is that Carbide 3D listens, thinks and improves, without egoisms of any kind. Actually I am a satisfied customer.

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as a very good example, ultimaker makes Cura which IMHO is the best free 3d slicer, there is also the paid simplfy3d

All I was trying to imply was that great hardware needs great software and judging by all the suggestions, this could be reality but right now it is just a want list

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I’ve used both and Cura works ok, but Simplify absolutely rocks. I like it so much that when I was tasked last year with finding a large format printer for work what finally sold me on the machine we bought is that Simplify supported it, so I made sure that software purchase was part of the budget. I rarely use the big printer at work, but our guys in our prototyping shop love it, and with zero 3D printing experience they have all mastered it’s use, based in large part I believe with how good that particular piece of software is and how easy it is to use.

The C3D software has come a very long way in the year and a half I’ve owned my XXL. I am currently using Vectric VCarve for most of my projects, but Carbide Create is nice and getting more capable all of the time. I also still use Carbide Motion as it is just super simple to use. I think for a small company that makes/designs software, hardware AND has great tech support it’s really hard to say anything bad about C3D. I had some issues early on, and the migration from CM3 to CM4 took awhile to mature, but it now does most of what I need it to do (I’d still love to see macros and multiple saveable job zeros). We also have to remember that this is a “kit” and customizable, they do a very good job of supporting the “unsupported” stuff we do to our machines. These things are made to be tinkered with, if you want a big production machine where you can have tech support show up at your door and help you fix anything that goes wrong you’ll likely be spending a whole bunch more money. Just my $0.02!

Dan

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I have been very happy with Carbide support but they tend to focus on hardware issues (which is good for me since I am more of a software person). I have found the Carbide software quite lacking and don’t really use it at all anymore. I used it the first couple months of doing CNC, and when they do new releases I install it just to see how things are coming along, but at this pace it will be decades before it is close to some of the competitors.

I use Vcarve for two reasons. One is that is full-featured and a high quality, well-tested piece of software. The other is that their software support is as good as Carbide’s hardware support–I can get a accurate answer in an hour depending on the time of day. 24 hours at the worst. Yeah its very expensive but compared to what I have invested in the hardware (dust collectors to $100 vacuum boots) it isn’t that bad. I just tell myself I am paying for those good folks at the other end of my emails.

I might use Carbide’s sender but it has never run on the PC that I have connected to the machine (refurb HP-Intel unit with an almost completely clean copy of Windows 10). Carbide could never really tell me why. Just never connects to the 3G. I mostly use UGS but its getting kind of frustrating because of all the different versions floating around: “classic,” “platform,” “beta platform”. The UI improved quite a bit in the platform version. I also have PUTTY around for configuration/debugging.

I keep getting prompts to try the Easel and I occasionally check-in with it. From what I can tell it is still ahead of Create, plus the MAKE folks seem to have latched on to it as their standard environment for DIY books, etc. Worth a test drive if you don’t want to pay $$.

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this topic is about motion, I use fusion 360 for all CAD and CAM

I did find this, testing to see if that is better

There are some comments above about alternate “sender” programs and I’m curious about that. What other apps (preferably on the Mac) are out there that support the Nomad?

Pretty much all of the opensource things also run on the Mac (there are only a few Windows-specific apps, GrblGru, Intelligcode, &c.):

https://www.shapeoko.com/wiki/index.php/Communication_/_Control

Probably Universal G-Code Sender is the most Mac-like, or maybe Chilipeppr.

I’m still faintly surprised that no one has done a machine control and CAD/CAM solution using Processing