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General Mach Discussion / Re: I'm a little confused?
« on: March 27, 2021, 03:58:08 PM »
Hi,
believe it or not I still think you are on the right track.......excepting only your choice of motion controller.
The Novusun board is to my knowledge a Mach3 only board, that is to say that it will run only with Mach's trajectory planner,
no other software will work. You can of course persevere with the Novusun controller and get it to work but minus extra support
that you might have obtained from the forum.
One of the problems of Chinese made motion controllers is that they only very loosely follow Mach3 protocols and therefore many of Mach's
features don not work as intended. Probing is a particular problem with Chinese made boards as they were intended to be run with pirated
(altered) versions of Mach3 rather than the genuine article.
While it may not be what you want to hear I would regard the Novusun as a mistake and discard it. In finding a replacement reject out of hand
anything Chinese, they make many great things but Mach ready motion controllers are not among them.
If you buy a Mach license, be it Mach3 OR Mach4, you pay for it online and the license file is emailed to you....no shipping....no customs.
PoKeys, CNCDrive and CSLabs are all European manufacturers, if you can't get one of their boards cheaper than I can....then emigrate, New
Zealand is a fair choice, in the South Island where I live we haven't had a community case of COVID for 10.5 months.
That is a laudable sentiment, although I would recommend Mach4 over Mach3, but still both a very well suited to what you want to do.
I notice that you said that you liked VB.......but why? Mach, 3 or 4, is a Gcode interpreter and trajectory planner and does not require VB
(or Lua in the case of Mach4) to operate. Certainly you can program your own macros in VB (Lua in the case of Mach4) if you want but many, even
most, Mach users NEVER program anything like that....and don't need to. In fact when I started to program my own Mach3 Macros in VB
six years ago I was so disgusted with VB as implemented by Mach3 that I ditched Mach3 altogether and bought Mach4, and have never looked back.
While this forum is abut NFS products, namely Mach3 and Mach4, and it it not really appropriate to mention or promote a competitors
product, in the interest of open and frank discussion....UCCNC software which is manufactured by CNCDrive, the same Hungarian manufacturer
of the UC series of controllers. I personally have never used UCCNC but by all reports is better than Mach3 and very close to Mach4 in performance.
Another alternative is LinuxCNC, free open source software and very capable indeed.
Thus you have three excellent choices of software, Mach4, UCCNC or LinuxCNC.....but all three have one thing in common....you'll not be able
to use your Novusun board with any of them.
Craig
believe it or not I still think you are on the right track.......excepting only your choice of motion controller.
The Novusun board is to my knowledge a Mach3 only board, that is to say that it will run only with Mach's trajectory planner,
no other software will work. You can of course persevere with the Novusun controller and get it to work but minus extra support
that you might have obtained from the forum.
One of the problems of Chinese made motion controllers is that they only very loosely follow Mach3 protocols and therefore many of Mach's
features don not work as intended. Probing is a particular problem with Chinese made boards as they were intended to be run with pirated
(altered) versions of Mach3 rather than the genuine article.
While it may not be what you want to hear I would regard the Novusun as a mistake and discard it. In finding a replacement reject out of hand
anything Chinese, they make many great things but Mach ready motion controllers are not among them.
Quote
In short I’m in France, it costs a fortune to get anything through customs.
If you buy a Mach license, be it Mach3 OR Mach4, you pay for it online and the license file is emailed to you....no shipping....no customs.
PoKeys, CNCDrive and CSLabs are all European manufacturers, if you can't get one of their boards cheaper than I can....then emigrate, New
Zealand is a fair choice, in the South Island where I live we haven't had a community case of COVID for 10.5 months.
Quote
The reason I wanted to use Mach 3 is that it has been well received over the years and I only wanted to do simple stuff with it.
That is a laudable sentiment, although I would recommend Mach4 over Mach3, but still both a very well suited to what you want to do.
I notice that you said that you liked VB.......but why? Mach, 3 or 4, is a Gcode interpreter and trajectory planner and does not require VB
(or Lua in the case of Mach4) to operate. Certainly you can program your own macros in VB (Lua in the case of Mach4) if you want but many, even
most, Mach users NEVER program anything like that....and don't need to. In fact when I started to program my own Mach3 Macros in VB
six years ago I was so disgusted with VB as implemented by Mach3 that I ditched Mach3 altogether and bought Mach4, and have never looked back.
While this forum is abut NFS products, namely Mach3 and Mach4, and it it not really appropriate to mention or promote a competitors
product, in the interest of open and frank discussion....UCCNC software which is manufactured by CNCDrive, the same Hungarian manufacturer
of the UC series of controllers. I personally have never used UCCNC but by all reports is better than Mach3 and very close to Mach4 in performance.
Another alternative is LinuxCNC, free open source software and very capable indeed.
Thus you have three excellent choices of software, Mach4, UCCNC or LinuxCNC.....but all three have one thing in common....you'll not be able
to use your Novusun board with any of them.
Craig