Like the title says, after pulling up the jog mode display with TAB. If I click on the Jog mode button twice so MPG is selected (MPG is lit up with yellow background) and ('X' LED adjacent to MPG Axis is lit up with green background). If I then click on the Alt-A  button I expect the green X led to go off and the Y LED to turn on, however every time I click on the Alt-A button Mach crashes about 2-3 seconds after I press the button, for the first second or two nothing happens and then the mouse cursor changes to a spinning spiral as if mach is busy thinking and never recovers.

What am I doing wrong?

My assumption is that if I have one MPG connected, that I can route the MPG to whatever axis I want to move by pressing Alt-A.

I figured it out.

I'm developing brains on a different machine than the one that actually controls my mill. On my development machine, the motor outputs were not defined.

Seems like mach3 needs some error checking with an appropriate error message instead of just crashing.

Hi,
all development of Mach3 ceased some time ago, what it is.....is what it will remain. Mach4 is current and still developing.

Craig

If I were to switch from Mach3 to Mach4 is there a summary of the salient features missing (and bugs) in mach4?

Hi,
for milling and routing there are no missing features. Mach4 is its best with an external motion controller like a Smoothstepper. Many of the features
like probing and lathe threading are enacted in the motion controller not Mach. To my knowledge all of the current Mach4 ready motion controllers
have probing, most have backlash compensation but only some have Torch Height Control or single point lathe threading.

Mach4s scripting environment is Lua. While Lua is very simple when you start adding API calls to Machs core, using wxWidgets for screen boxes/panels
and understanding Machs modular program structure can be quite daunting at first. No doubt if you read some of the threads in the Mach4 board you will
get the sense that many are convinced that they can't program Lua, but with assistance they do and derive considerable satisfaction and confidence from it.

I'm not personally aware of any bugs, there are a number of things which I thought worked one way but found that they in fact work some other way but
not actually faulty.

Craig

Thanks,

I might make the switch. I only use 3-axis at this point and have a PoKeys 57E for additional I/O. I have not moved the stepper drive over to the 57E (yet)

I'm thrilled with the ease of use of PoBlocks to add logic, very easy to use and when used with shared data and Brains it provides considerable flexibility.

Hi,
the Pokeys has a Mach4 plugin so you would be good to go.

If you are not averse to learning some new tricks and programing you'll be delighted with Mach4. The demo version is fully featured but runs for about
5-6 minutes before it needs to be reset. If you use the Sim(ulator) motion plugin then there are no limitations except the obvious...you can't control
actual motors!

Because Mach4 is completely new you can't upgrade from Mach3, you would have to buy a new licence, $200USD for Mach4Hobby.

Craig