We been tsting GRBL 1.1 and Carbide Motion 4 with a number of people in the forum for the last week and we're feeling good enough about it to open the beta up to a larger group. If you're interested in checking out the latest software/firmware, read on.
First, a warning:
DON'T UPGRADE IF YOU ARE USING YOUR MACHINE FOR PRODUCTION OR CANNOT RISK HAVING YOUR MACHINE DOWN WHILE WE WORK THROUGH THIS EARLY RELEASE
What CM4 and GRBL 1.1 adds
- Feedrate overrides
- Better jogging
- Retract on pause for cleaning
Who's it for
All Nomads, Shapeoko XL and XXL machines and Shapeoko 3's with homing switches
While it should work going back to even the Kickstarter Nomads (what we call the non-Pro Nomads), there have been reports of errors being thrown by GRBL on those boards. If you have one of the original Nomads, you might want to wait a few days for us to continue working through those problems.
Compatibility
Carbide Motion 4 only works with GRBL 1.1, and Carbide Motion 3 only works with GRBL 0.9- you cannot mix and match
Where do I get it from
https://docs.carbide3d.com/support/carbideupdater/
FAQ
I'm getting "Limit Switch Hit" Errors Did you change your GRBL settings manually to enable soft limits? Don't do that. Reload the default settings in Carbide Motion.
Will custom settings be saved? No. All settings are deleted when the machine is upgraded so if you've modified anything, like the steps per mm on a Shapeoko, be sure to record those values before reflashing the unit.
Is an Internet connection required for the new CM4? No. The docs do mention a browser window but the browser is only communicating with a server embedded in Carbide Motion itself. Carbide Motion runs totally locally on your PC or Mac.
Are there going to be more firmware updates for GRBL? We sure hope not. We've held off on releasing this until we could be sure that there would not be a need to reflash the unit again. There will be more CM releases, but these will not require reflashing GRBL.
When I try to run the updater I get: "The program can't start because MSVCP120.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem." Go to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=407843 and install the Microsoft Windows Redistributable package. We didn't want to create an installer for a one-time program like the updater so we didn't include this. In most cases, it'll already be installed on your machine.