I went from a 34T chainring to a 36T chainring and never changed any software settings.......Will my motor stop working and require a trip to my local bike shop?
That depends, but it easily may happen!
If your programmed drivetrain configuration (chainring size, number of gears, smallest sprocket and largest sprocket of your cassette) on a DU-EP600 or DU-EP801 based bike does not match the real values, you easily can catch an E295 error and after you have received 4 times an E925 error you will get the final E299 error which will completely lock your drive unit and you have to unlock it from the Shimano service centre and your bike will be out of warranty forever (also after unlocking from the Shimano service centre)!
Chances for these errors when the drivetrain configuration does not match are extremely high if you e.g. go uphill slowly in a very small gear, because then the tolerance band of the "antitunig" algrithm of the motor firmware is at its limits and beyond. Via this algoritm Shimano tries to identify some of these bloody oldschool electronic boxes (called "dongles" sometimes) which manipulate the signal from the speed sensor (and will not work at all on a DU-EP600 or DU-EP801 drive unit). So, never ever use such crap tools (like SpeedBox, MBIQ, BadAss, RedPad, PearTune as well as Planet3 „mechanical tuning“, etc.) on such a bike, because it will miserably fail.
So, some bikers who very often are using these extreme drivetrain settings may easily been hit by these fatal errors, some others who are using their drivetrain not in such extreme postitions may never get such errors. But there is a high risk and every biker with these new generation drive units from Shimano should be aware of this high risk and much better do a correction of the programmed values if there was a change in the drive train components done.
Especially if there is no "real" display mounted on the bike (and e.g. only the SW-EN600-L remote control unit mounted on the left hand side handle bar, like e.g. on many Orbea bikes) chances are very high that the biker will not realize that he already had an E295 (because this SW-EN600-L will just blink red) and then just restarts the bike (which will work with a E295) and then will realize that after 5 of these situations there is no more motor support at all because he finally has got the final fatal E299, which is the end of the sad story...
So, again: Don´t change components on the drivetrain without changing also the related settings!
Take care: A local bike shop CANNOT reset any final E295 - the bike (or drive unit) needs to be sent to a Shimano service centre and they don´t do this job for free normally. I know that some bike owners have paid up to 300€ for this reset process.
With a cable bound SM-PCE02 interface you can easily do the correct configuration of your new chainring size by yourself already in the licence key free (and so completely free of charge version) of the Windows based
miniMax - program.