Hi,
yes that's correct, the ESS is Ethernet Smooth Stepper. The Ethernet offers measurably less latency than USB. USB still works pretty damn well, latency
or not.
When I made the decision to switch to Mach4 my intention was to use a parallel port, after all I'd had plenty of success with Mach3 and dual PP. But then
it occurred to me that despite buying secondhand off Ebay I paid an average of $200 each for my Vexta drivers over $200 for my steppers with low backlash
planetary gearboxes, over $1000 for a German made spindle....and the list goes on. Why would I pinch pennies after spending lots for the best I could afford
for everything else?
I have found myself in similar situations before where I come on all righteous about spending a sum of money when I have blithely done exactly that for
another item which may have less overall impact than the item in question. That's how the ESS is, a smallish investment in the overall scale of what I've
put into my mill and yet it has probably the most impact on how it will perform. So I bought it. It has proven to be money well spent. Its not magic by
any stretch of the imagination but I have smoother and more reliable motion as a result. In addition I've had to learn a whole bunch about Ethernet
comm protocols, the internals of motion controls and so on. Any and all learning is a positive outcome for our hobby.
I think your strategy is fine. Quite frankly worrying about the charge pump I think is a waste of energy and I don't think anyone in NFS or Art F have any interest
is such an arcane fault. I never had a charge pump with Mach3 and don't need one with Mach4 either. The parallel port still works pretty damn well. Art has
said right from the get go that Darwin will never have all the features that the Mach3 PP had, like single point lathe threading and so on. When you exhaust the
possibilities of Darwin there are a number of external motion controllers around the $200 mark.
The question is best placed on the Warp9 forum but the USB Smooth Stepper has a smaller FPGA IC in it than the Ethernet Smooth Stepper. There is a question
whether there is enough silicon real estate in the smaller FPGA to achieve all that has been accomplished with the ESS. It seems the answer is....probably....
but until Andy actually tries it no one knows for sure.
Either way I suspect that over a period of time you'll become addicted to the flexibility of Mach4 and quietly Mach3 will drop out of sight. I've never really fiddled with
Modbus in Mach3 until recently, trying to help someone else, and it made me realise that the Mach4 Modbus plugin is JUST SO MUCH BETTER!!! This is just the
latest realisation of what amounts to quite a list of powerful and flexible features built into Mach4s structure.
Craig