I have a Shapeoko from 2016. I am still running Carbide Motion v3.0.366 and haven’t upgraded it or the firmware because I wanted to avoid breaking something.
However - I just bought the Z-plus since I mostly use it to cut aluminum.
The Z-plus uses inductive limit switch. This requires newer control board than I have.
But I haven’t been using the limit switches in over 2 years. (Had an issues, disabled them and haven’t had a good reason to fix them()
So - can I just upgrade to the Z-plus, leave the limit switches unplugged like I do today? Then I don’t need to spend the $135 for the new board too.
I am guessing I’ll need to upgrade firmware to 1.1 and Carbide motion to v5 - which would give me some niceties like on the fly speed control.
What would you do?
You can’t upgrade to CM5 w/o homing switches — it would also require Grbl 1.1
You could upgrade to Grbl 1.1 and use a 3rd party communication / control program
Carbide Motion 3 doesn’t have the defaults for a Z-Plus, so you’d have to enter the $102 setting for the number of steps for the Z-Plus lead screw in the MDI if you continued to use it.
I’d suggest using the homing switches — the new boards have improved EMI characteristics and you could keep the old one (and an install of CM3) as a spare if need be.
That explains the chain of dependencies. And explains that I could do just the zplus with some other tweaks and changes. I’ve been tempted to try another g-code sender but Carbide Motion has been working well so far for us.
Ultimately telling me that the new board has better EMI sold me and the board is ordered.
