Just in case we haven’t been explicit about this before, we absolutely do not want to do any presales or pre-announcement. We would prefer to build a month of machines and then announce the new thing and start shipping on day one. That’s not what customers want so we try to accommodate them, because they’re the reason we have a company. (What we want doesn’t matter in this case)
For what it’s worth, in the past we tried announcing and not taking preorders and that didn’t make anyone happy, it just filled our inbox with people who were mad that they couldn’t preorder.
Well, you’re in luck. The code is working and it’s looking good so we can share a bit more.
The Shapeoko 5 Pro electronics have two additional features we can share:
We added hardware to keep settings persistently in the machine, so we can save the configuration information in the machine, not on your computer. It’s a small thing, but it should be a win for users that change the computers that run Carbide Motion, or use multiple machines on a single computer. We’ll need to add code to CM over time to enable it, but the hardware is working.
Second, and more importantly, we added an expansion port that will let us create additional peripherals that integrate with the machine using a single connection that provides data and power. Peripherals will mainly be I/O, coordinated by Carbide Motion. Peripherals could range from light towers to ATC controllers.
As excited as we are about the possibilities, we haven’t made any peripherals yet, so you shouldn’t buy a machine based on a potential product that we haven’t made.
(There’s another feature in the electronics that we should be able to share next week)
More luck, depending on where you are in the queue. We’re going to push the start of shipping back from 12/28 to 1/3 so that we can test the final firmware a little more. We do not want to require firmware updates in the field if we don’t have to. Pushing the date back will affect very few people because our shipping model was based on a very slow ramp up.
BUT, we’re ahead of our production estimates right now so we should be shipping most machines well ahead of the projection you were shown when you bought. We’ll know the dates better next week, but it should be weeks earlier for most users if nothing goes wrong in the next few days.