It is important to note that if you have a good Ethernet controller in the PC that has as many transmit buffers as it does receive, you can reduce the motion buffer to a point where feed rate changes seem instant to us humans. I routinely run a motion buffer of 60ms with good Intel Ethernet cards which is well below the 100ms "blink of an eye" threshold that we humans can detect. But I also don't try and run a CAM program at the same time I'm cutting a part either. And in my opinion, once you put Mach on a PC, you should no longer consider it a PC. It should then be considered a machine control and you really don't run CAM programs on a machine control.
The PoKeys57E can be used as just I/O. The same plugin will do motion as well. So how do you tell tell Mach to use ESS as motion? Enable both Pokey and ESS plugins. Then take the menu path Configure->Select Motion Dev... and choose the ESS.
The ESS and PoKeys manuals are really good too. I love both products and consistently use them together on my project machines when applicable. We are lucky to have Warp 9, PMDX, Vital Systems, and Pokeys devices from which to choose!
Steve
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