Hi,
I think there are a number of issues that you need to consider.....and probably the choice between Mach3 or Mach4 is
less important than others.
The first thing that occurs to me is that you want to be able to load your machine and then to all intents and purposes
walk away from it while its working. I don't know how much CNC machining you have done but that sounds like a disaster
waiting to happen.
There is a reason that production companies employ CNC operators to run their machines......they need looking after.
Things like tool wear....the tool goes blunt....it overloads and breaks. The machine can't tell, that's the operators job.
A piece of material shifts in a vice, the machine cant tell and it carries on machining...crash. Mach3 (or Mach4
or LinuxCNC or UCCNC.....) has a moment and your steppers lose steps, the machine can't tell and it carries on
machining....crash.
I could go on listing examples but the bottom line is that a CNC machine needs supervision. Very expensive production
machines with equally expensive dedicated hardware controllers like Fanuc and Seimens ($20,000 plus) run reliably
enough that an experienced operator might monitor several machines but still each machine needs supervision.
I would recommend that if you have a good quality machine which has been well integrated with a Mach3 controller
then I would stick with it for some time. Make some parts, gain some lots of experience. Once you have that
experience you will also know whether further automation of starting/stopping/loading material is realistic or not.
As far as the debate between Mach3 and Mach4.....both are Gcode interpreters and trajectory planners, so they both read
nearly identical Gcode and cut nearly identical toolpaths. There is little to pick and choose between them.
The real strength of Mach4 is its ability and flexibility to be customized. You are not ready yet to customize your machine
and therefore see no reason to break up what you have got.
Further down the track when you do, if your experience concludes that automation is desirable and realistic, then consider
the change to Mach4. If indeed your controller is based on an Ethernet SmoothStepper then you could change to Mach4
without any hardware changes or rewiring.
Changing from Mach3 to Mach4 can be quite challenging. No doubt if you do some reading on the forum you will find
comments along the lines 'Mach4 is complicated to set up', and there is a certain amount of truth to that. All that flexibility
that I have mentioned comes at a cost of complexity. Many recent converts or those upgrading from Mach3 seem to be of
the opinion that the software should operate this way......and another believes it should operate that way.....and all seem to
believe that it should operate perfectly with no setup involved. That is not the case. Fortunately there is now an increasing
body of knowledge on the forum and, say, the Warp9 website to assist.
You can put a ring around spending a week or more pulling your hair out but once over that hump it is much easier,
even a pleasure.
Thereafter there is still the challenge of learning Lua, the Mach4 scripting language. As it turns out Lua itself is pretty simple
but you need to combine that with understanding the underlying control structure and API of Mach4. I'm not going to say
its easy but its far from impossible. Once you have that under your belt then Mach4 is limited by your imagination only.
Craig