I’m looking at the 4x2 Shapeoko Pro 5 as an upgrade to my existing CNC. The mechanicals and value seem great, and I’m motivated to go with Shapeoko because they post lots of really useful stuff on YouTube.
But looking pretty quickly at Carbide Motion, it looks pretty basic. And in my quick survey of GRBL motion controllers, I’m not finding anything much better.
My current CNC uses UCCNC, a UC100 controller, and Gecko stepper motor driver. I added a commercial screenset to get fairly extensive probing macros (screenshot attached), which I use often. I also use the toolpath preview often, which is orthographic (important!) and shows machine position (also important). I do not know what I would do without all these features, yet I’ve not found solid GRBL control software with these features to date.
I like the idea of using the Carbide 3D motion control box, and UCCNC isn’t perfect, but at present it seems like my best option is to buy the Shapeoko without the control box, and use my existing control system.
Put another way, it looks like the Shapeoko Pro 5 is a far superior package to the machine control software that Carbide 3d provides, which although may be great at getting beginners going, doesn’t seem like what I’d expect from a semi-pro system.
Am I missing something out there? Is there a better way?
Are you talking about replacing the hardware controller on the Shapeoko Pro 5, or just Carbide Motion?
If you’re looking for an alternative to Carbide Motion, I think maybe GSender has some of the features you are looking for, and I’m pretty sure people have used it successfully with Shapeoko 5 Pro machines.
GSender is largely associated with Sienci Labs (makers or Longmill and Altmill machines), but is actually open source and its development is hosted on Github.
I’m a total newbie, and I’m just starting to mess around with it, but it does look more capable and more customizable than Carbide Motion.
considering replacing the controller, because the GRBL controller SW packages all fall short
As I recall, GSender has a perspective viewer, not orthographic, which makes it useless for my needs. Also I looked into writing probing macros to cover my needs and ran into issues, can’t remember the specifics. All the GRBL SW I’ve looked at so far has seen half baked compared to UCCNC and my commercial “screenset”
This seems like just a long list of GRBL SW, some of which I’ve already looked at and don’t have what I need. Do you know of any that have the features I need which I already enumerated?
As I recall, GSender has a perspective viewer, not orthographic
Sorry, I thought it had an orthographic viewer. Hmmmm, now I’m not sure.
Just curious, and I know this doesn’t answer the questions you are asking, but does the Masso controller on the Onefinity machines get you the features you are looking for?
