Hi,
the UC100 is not a patch on an ESS.
Firstly its about USB verses Ethernet, Ethernet wins hands down in latency and noise immunity.
The UC100 maxes out at 100kHz whereas an ESS is good to 4Mhz, that is 40 times faster!.
The UC100 has 17 IOs whereas an ESS has 51 IOs, that is three times more.
Whether you need the additional performance is doubtful in a hobby machine,
A UC100 could not hope to run my mill, I require a pulse output rate to the servos of 416.66kHz. I have
21 digital inputs, nine for limits and homes, one for a probe, one for an Estop and five for a wired pendant.
The remaining five inputs are alarms, one for each axis. I have 10 differential outputs for up to five axes,
two outputs for the spindle, one of those is PWM and another output for the coolant pump, and one output
as an Enable commoned to all axes.
That's a total of 35 IOs....but that's OK I've still got 16 IOs in reserve
The ESS has arguably the most complete Mach4 plugin with realtime supports for backlash comp, single
point lathe threading, spindle PID, realtime plasma torch height control. The UC100 misses on all of those
features. The manufacturer of the UC100, CNCDrive, is naturally more interested in promoting their own
software rather than Mach and so it dubious that the UC100 will ever have a competing Mach plugin.
The UC100 is 80Euro or $89USD. The ESS is $190USD, so is indeed about twice the price but the ESS
is
SO much more than double the motion control solution.
Craig