I have a 1995 6'X10' waterjet table with Oriental 5Phase steppers and I am in the process of switching the motion software to Mach3. I just realized one thing I haven't thought about is the motion is not real smooth on the old Indexer LPT system & never has been. I don't run it above 80IPM with a rapid of 200IPM. Will Mach3 by itself run smoother or do I need smoothstepper? I think my rough motion problem is the old motion software.

If your computer puts out a smooth pulse and you dont need the a high pulserate then the smoothstepper will be unlikely to make a huge difference. On my Bridgeport the motors do seem to sound nicer with the smooth stepper but I have not managed any increase in speed or noticed any difference in the machine other than the sound.
 If you have Mach installed on your computer go to the Mach3 folder and double click on the DriverTest.exe you will get a window pop up and it will run a test and let you know what your pulse is like. If it is full of big spikes then you may have problems.
Hood

Hi, Steve

To test out your current stepper system,  All you need Access to is the Step & Direction Pin's and Ground terminals and give it a shot.

On the pendant you emailed me about, I'm pretty sure you'll need to feed hold to change the z height.

Chip

'Roughness' can generally be attributed to the PC not putting out a nice clean pulse stream to the stepper drivers. Other processes running on the PC or sometimes the PC hardware itself can prevent the precise timing needed. I would first start with running Machs driver test and seeing that that looks like. On this forums download page you can also find a document that describes how to optimize the PC to run Mach, this can help out a lot in some cases.

The SmoothStepper works so well because it moves all the stuff that requires really precise timing onto dedicated hardware. I like to recommend them to folks as it eliminates the possible complications of the parallel port. The folks I have sold them too really like them.