maxnc driven by mach III

[jc2010]

I have a 15cl2 and I can't locate my floppy disks supplied with it. They appear to be out of business so I've been looking for an alternative software to drive the machine.
My question is: Do I still need my floppies or will Mach3 take the place of them?
It also seems mach 3 has additional features that the maxnc software did not have.
thanks,
John

[Hood]

I have never seen one but you should be able to load Mach and configure it to work in MaxNC mode and it should work, obviously your computer will  need to be the minimum specs at least for running Mach. If you look here ftp://anonymous@machsupport.com/ExtraInformation/ and scroll down a bit you will get some info on pinouts of MaxNC machines.

Hood

[jc2010]

Thank you. I've gotten some good info from your post.

[Hood]

Be sure to let us know if you get it running and a few pics are always nice
Hood

[jc2010]

I found my original software and right now I'm trying to get my machine working and am getting a limit switch error. Checked all the cables several times but still not working.

[Hood]

Afraid I cant help with the MaxNC software, never seen or used it

Hood

[DaOne]

I had a max nc10. It wasn't a closed loop version. The best thing I did was buy a new driver board and hook it all up. It had much more power, sounded allot better and I knew what I was dealing with. The hardware on the maxnc isn't bad but the electronics was old school. I did have a friend that had a closed loop nc15 and made it work a long time ago with mach. if my memory serves me right he had to disable the encoders.

[dhollist]

I found my original software and right now I'm trying to get my machine working and am getting a limit switch error. Checked all the cables several times but still not working.

I too have a MAXNC machine and cannot locate my software disc.  Since the company seems to be out of business, would I be able to get a copy of your disc?  Many thanks,  Dave

[Tj256]

I wound up completely junking their controller and wiring up a Geckodrive G540. That wasn't without it's issues either. Their engineering department at gecko is awsome, but they punt on the whole issue of having to set up EPP mode on your parallel port or certain functions won't work. namely the "charge pump". I found this response kind of annoying since most parallel ports don't let you set this up. At least not the ones that you can plug into the PCI bus.  So either MachIII needs to add the ability to put the port in EPP mode or you have to just avoid using the "open collector" parallel port pins. That meant (For me) wiring up to two parallel ports so I had enough I/O lines.

At any rate MaxNC's controller is basically flawed from a design standpoint so I'd start by replacing that. I then wound up hooking up the encoders to the parallel port as well, and writing a brain to turn off the machine if the encoders get out of sync with the position of the steppers. It was a month long project but in the end my machine is working. I will probably upload a video to youtube tonight on what I did.

The software Max ships is simply an older version of MachIII. I wound up not using that and just downloading the latest from the artsoft website. The same software key should work.

I'm not surprised they went under. These flaws have been in their machines for years. I don't know why they didn't fix them. After awhile, enough people bail and you have no customers   Sad

[Bob La Londe]

I have a 15cl2 and I can't locate my floppy disks supplied with it. They appear to be out of business so I've been looking for an alternative software to drive the machine.

As far as I know Max NC is still in business and doing fine right here in Arizona.  I traded some e-mails with them earlier this year when I was retrofitting one of their machines.