I studied some part of Warp9 ESS on the website. I felt confused when found 3nos of DB26 ports are available on ESS board, is it possible to use them separately for controlling 3 different machines. If yes, how it is managed from software/Mach side??

Please enlighten further !!!!

Hi,

I felt confused when found 3nos of DB26 ports are available on ESS board, is it possible to use them separately for controlling 3 different machines

In general no. There is one only motion controller thread with the FPGA, the brains of the board. The three ports mean however
you can have up to 51 inputs/outputs to that one machine and/or accessories like pendants and control panels.

Mach3 can only have one instance running at a time.

Mach4 was always intended to be able to have multiple instances. At this time while that capacity is there it is not
developed. There is a version (Mach4Expert) that can have multiple instances, up to six, and thus a machine or machines
could have up to 36 coordinated axes and 36 out-of-band axes. Six streams of Gcode run simultaneously with special
synchronization macros to communicate between threads. Pretty damned clever!

Craig

Thanks Craig for elaboration. Actually I think SLD/WD is not given on website to have visualization.

Please share some other Ethernet based motion controllers for further study.

Hi,
my interest is in Mach4 given that all development ceased on Mach3 six years ago.

The standout controller for Mach4 is the Ethernet SmoothStepper ($180USD) having the most complete realtime support features
of ALL Mach4 controllers EXCEPTING closed loop analogue support, if that is required the the Hicon Integra by Vital Systems
is the pick of the bunch. With the analogue activations it is $1200USD. You pay a real premium for analogue servo support.

Craig