Hi,
until about three years ago I ran Mach3 on one, then later two parallel ports to control my three axis homemade benchtop
bed mill. I used a dual core Atom base MiniITX board as PC. It worked really well.
Three years ago I stepped up to Mach4 and an Ethernet SmoothStepper using the same wee Atom PC. The PC being so underpowered
is slow to do the first toolpath draw of a largish Gcode file but fine for milling files. It would be to painfully slow to draw 50Mb 3D engraving
files.
There are a number of controllers that work with Mach4, and only one Chinese one and its absolute rubbish.
At the current time the external controllers, which are Mach4 'native', have a mix of supported features. Currently Vital Systems HiCon board is
the only manufacturer to have developed THC support in a Mach4 ready board.
Warp9 TD's Ethernet SmoothStepper Mach4 plugin does not do THC but has recently added backlash compensation and single point lathe threading.
You will have to do some research on what features are supported in Mach3. If you were considering an external controller go for an Ethernet
connected unit like the UC300, the Ethernet SmoothStepper or a 57CNC by PoKeys. The noise resilience is so much better than USB.
Further I think all of these boards have full realtime function support, ie THC, probing, lathe threading etc. If you want one of these buy direct from
the manufacturer or their nominated distributor, if you buy off EBay or Amazon you'll get ripped with some Chinese copy.....don't do it!!!
If you buy Chines s*********t then don't expect it to work. I've gotten so jaded with people buying Chinese rubbish and then turning up on the
forum to get help to get them to work......and China might as well be on another planet when it comes to getting help, that I don't
bother responding anymore.
Craig