I agree Jeff. I'd love to go Smoothstepper or whatever. I'll even deal with that cost hit.
What kills me is it just isn't up to the standard of the parallel port. Yes, it can drive the steppers faster, BUT (and it's a big BUT), all sorts of stuff that works fine on parallel doesn't work for Smoothstepper. We have essentially no idea when it will work, and only a very poor idea of who is responsible. I'm not even sure we have an especially clear idea of what might not work either.
Backlash comp is a great example. Smoothstepper says it really ought to be dealt with on the Mach end, but BTW, he's gonna deal with it. But, when? Hmmm.
It's gotten further than GRex, but it is still pretty scary to bet on it because it could either disappear or not be properly supported or wind up crosswise with Mach3 the way GRex did.
The sooner we can get to a solution that avoids the parallel port and the fact that Windows is not a real time OS and that is also fully on par with the parallel port in every respect and is well supported, the happier life will be. Wouldn't it be cool if you could buy an integrated Smoothstepper + G540 kind of device for probably $50-75 more than a G540 after Mariss got done with it and all the Mach3 features worked great?
Hallelujah!
Cheers,
BW