I’m trying to figure out how to enable and disable one of the y stepper motor . I am trying replace it with a rotary axis motor that has a built in close loop stepper driver ont he back of it . The manual says to disable the y axis and replace it with the rotary axis motor before starting . And I have no manuals on how to do it for shapeoko5 . I contacted scienci labs: but they can’t help me because it’s a shapeoko .
There is no “disable” switch for an axis on the controller that you can access - physical, software, or otherwise. And if you disconnect the motors, you lose holding power. The machine could push itself away from a cut. So I’m not sure that’s a viable way forward.
You are looking to modify a machine that was manufactured to work as designed? What is one closed stepper motor going to do for you when it will have no “close loop” interface with the Shapeoko controller. This is an open loop design?
You shouldn’t be unplugging the steppers while the machine is in operation. And there’s a lot of challenges with what you’re trying to do, specifically in making a controller do something it was not designed to do.
Long story and technical discussion short - There is no good way to do this without swapping out for a third party controller, and third party control software.