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Mach3 under Vista / Re: Will MACH3 ever support 64-bit systems? Officially? FYI, it's 2010
« on: January 29, 2010, 05:27:41 AM »
Bob, I would respectfully disagree that there are 'all sorts of things' that don't work on the SmoothStepper. The number I am aware of is down to a handful. I use quite a few SmoothSteppers in my controls and have to say that the number of things I have found my customers wanted to do that can't be done currently with the SmoothStepper I can count on a few fingers. That's not to say there is not room for improvement.
Art has taken many years to get the parallel port driver to its current level of functionality and Greg has done a great job of capturing 95% of that in just a few years with the SmoothStepper. As Art has said in the getting the first large chunk of functionality is the easy part, the last few % is much, much harder. Another issue is that there are a few tricks that folks can use with the parallel port driver currently that were not designed in 'features', like having two axis mapped the same in Ports&Pins and then selectively enabling them while the machine is running. Obviously that is not the ideal way to implement using a single axis in two different ways but Mach does not support a better alternative at present. I don't think we'll ever see these 'unintended features' replicated in any external motion control device, but I do think we'll see Mach and products like the SmoothStepper grow to support a better way to do things like this.
As we see Mach mature to work better with external motion control boards we will see better motion control boards as well.
Art has taken many years to get the parallel port driver to its current level of functionality and Greg has done a great job of capturing 95% of that in just a few years with the SmoothStepper. As Art has said in the getting the first large chunk of functionality is the easy part, the last few % is much, much harder. Another issue is that there are a few tricks that folks can use with the parallel port driver currently that were not designed in 'features', like having two axis mapped the same in Ports&Pins and then selectively enabling them while the machine is running. Obviously that is not the ideal way to implement using a single axis in two different ways but Mach does not support a better alternative at present. I don't think we'll ever see these 'unintended features' replicated in any external motion control device, but I do think we'll see Mach and products like the SmoothStepper grow to support a better way to do things like this.
As we see Mach mature to work better with external motion control boards we will see better motion control boards as well.