We had issues looking for a system that would thread on a lathe. Oh, and the parallel port is dead- it was barely usable 25 years ago forget it now- are you still using your floppy drive?Ĭlick to expand.Got to agree with Ron here that the world has moved on. Mach3 was great, 15 years ago when it started, but the world has moved on and there are much for capable controls now. it was to easy for freeloaders to just break programs in 499 lines. As with M3 the demo will run without license, but it is no longer a 500 line limit- the limit is now a random time of a few minutes. The demo is available for download from. You would go home with a converted 7x16 mini lathe from Little Machines Shop. Im doing another lathe class in April, in Detroit- there is still time for a couple more guys, but we need to know in a few days. A couple years ago we did a mill build for 12 guys with the PMDX box. I did a lathe build class last year (Kvom was one of 14 students) we used a pokey control on a motherboad from. It has full encoder support for lathe spindle and I think the best form- screw terminals easy to mount board. There are a few high end motion controllers but they are out of my budget so I dont know much about them. My mill uses a Pokey for pendant and a PMDX416 for motion. I have used the PoKeys, and the smart BOBs PMDX from PMDX as well as the ethernet smoothstepper. There are several available in the hobby range. It does require a hardware motion controller. If you are into reading manuals there are several documents in the installer- install the demo and look under Mach4hobby\Docs. It uses LUA as the programming language, a very complete and powerful language. The ability to make great screen sets is all there. It has built in screen editor, screen elements have all the modern screen widgets- pulldown list, scroll bars, tabbed dialogs, just about every windows function. The design of the software is extremely well done. Motion is smoother, feed hold is instant. The industrial customers do not post to forums or mail lists. He has many OEM customers and there are many sales out there- the hobby guys seem to think its new and no one is using it yet. He has hired a few guys for development and support so he is selling where the real money is. Mach4 does not have a big presence in the hobby world because Brian is working the industrial world. I wrote some of the M3 wizards and the NfsMill wizard package. I do have a close connection- I work for Newfangled, Brian Barker, doing the wizards and support. I have been using Mach4 for a couple years now.
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