Notes, tools, and fixes for running a ShopBot CNC Router entirely from Linux. I'm tired of Windows in my workshop.
If you're like me, you love your ShopBot (Seriously, thank you Ted and Sallye... and all the other folks at ShopBot that I've met and made friends with over the years. You folks rock!) but you've been pushed to the breaking point with Windows either updating during a long running job or just being absolutely obnoxious to contend with in general... a man can only press "please don't send my data to Microsoft" so many times before madness takes hold. This work may very well be the result of that madness... but I think it's glorious madness!
So with that in mind, I started putting some of my knowledge to work getting the pieces of my workflow to work under Wine on Linux. If you're not familiar, Wine (https://www.winehq.org/) is an abstraction layer to enable you to run Windows software under Linux and it works really well... so well in fact that Valve has adopted it for running a lot of Windows games on their custom hardware and let's face it, if it can run AAA video games, it can run the ShopBot and Vectric software, right? I'm a big fan of my SteamDeck and how well it works so I felt like it was beyond time to get my ShopBot working under Wine and documenting it for others.
I will confess that I have used (and likely will keep using) AI LLMs for this, specifically Claude Code (Opus 4.7). I like to think I'm smart and clever and, for some of this, I know the basics of how to do it on my own... finding the USB IDs and ensuring the right driver modules are playing right along with communicating correctly is in my wheel house but doing heavy diagnosis of weird Windows application problems isn't so I couldn't do this without the assistance. If that's too much for you... I get it.
Maybe you can use what I've found here and make it work for your own needs or improve it because there is some disrepency or hallucination that needs to be corrected. As someone using these tools regularly... they definitely make mistakes and need babysitting and double checking so feel free to inspect things and improve them for yourself. This isn't entirely a work of AI tools... it's me using them to make something interesting work for me.
I've tried to keep this organized and the various sections are self-contained. Each lives in its own directory with its own README. Hopefully it's useful for you how I have it setup. I'll do my best to provide documentation for how I got this working for my setup... likely under Arch Linux using Bottles (https://usebottles.com/ - Get it... Wine... it comes in bottles... Software names are a hoot!). I'll also try to provide generic instuctions as well so hopefully it'll work with whatever Linux distribution or Wine variation you're using.
Each section follows the same flow: an index, a short quick-start, the specific setup/fix steps, common problems, then deeper detail for anyone who wants it.
| Section | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Vectric VCarve under Wine | Running the Vectric design/CAM software (VCarve, and by extension Aspire / Cut2D / Cut3D) under Wine, including the fixes needed to make it launch and render correctly. |
| ShopBot comms — the USB-serial link | The hardware connection: udev rules, the CP210x driver, stable /dev names, and Wine COM-port mapping for the ShopBot's two USB-serial adapters. Set this up first. |
| ShopBot control software (SB3) | The ShopBot Control Software (Sb3.exe) under Wine: install, the fixes it needs, first-run configuration, and connecting to the machine over the comms link above. |
shopbot-linux/
├── README.md ← you are here
├── vcarve/ ← Vectric software under Wine (should work for Aspire, VCarve, Cut2D, etc)
│ ├── README.md
│ ├── libvcarve_fix.c
│ ├── libvcarve_fix.so
│ └── screenshots/
├── shopbot-comms/ ← the USB-serial hardware link (set up first)
│ ├── README.md
│ ├── 99-shopbot.rules
│ └── install-udev-rules.sh
├── shopbot-control/ ← the ShopBot Control Software (Sb3.exe) under Wine
│ ├── README.md
│ ├── apply-fixes.sh
│ ├── fix-*.sh
│ ├── wire-com-ports.sh
│ └── screenshots/
└── docs/ ← shared notes that span multiple sections
See LICENSE. The fixes and documentation here are provided as-is with no guarantees. You're running this stuff at your own risk. Vectric (https://www.vectric.com/) and ShopBot (https://shopbottools.com/) software are the property of their respective owners; this project ships no proprietary binaries — only open-source compatibility tools and instructions. The license also provides absolutely no guarantees and I'd be willing to bet that neither ShopBot nor Vectric are going to support you for any of this so you're on your own... though there is a good chance if you've made it this far, you know that much already.
If, for some reason, you want to get in touch then find me at marshallmassengill<at>gmail<dot>com.