Mach 3 VS Mach 4

many cad/cam products follow the same license scheme except it's usually 1 license per computer . $200 for 5 machines seems pretty reasonable . Art simply made a $25 plugin for the new software that newfangled is creating . Not any different than any other paid plugins or screen sets . Art did a fantastic job of supporting mach 3 , and as already mentioned he revolutionized the hobby . If it wasn't for mach then I highly doubt that the hobby would be anywhere near as big as it is . EMC2 is also responsible at the same time but the fear of running linux kept a lot of people from venturing down that path .
Newfangled dropped the ball , and it's outright stupid what they are doing . People have been waiting far too long , and they should never have announced it's creation so soon . New companies are stepping all over them right now and they're going to be left in the dust if the don't get it together soon . Plus why buy mach 3 since it's unsupported and no longer being fixed or supported , by right they should be charging 1/2 price for a dead software or offer an upgrade price to mach 4 once its complete
Personally I can handle the wait . I've got 4 mills set up with mach 3 and they are putting out loads of product per week without issue . I don't use probes , pendants or any other gadget that could interfere with my pc and everything is straight out of the pp . Once the new version is complete and safe then I'll probably migrate , otherwise if or when the time comes I'll get back into linuxcnc since it's much better than the alternatives

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Originally Posted by bozidar22

At a cabinfever seminar i remember the mach guys talking about how piracy was a big issue with mach3. My guess is thats why the license is linked and limited to a certain number of computers.

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That's a crazy attitude. People who use pirated software will not buy Mach4, they will do their best to find a pirated copy. Period. People who don't use pirated copies will not buy Mach4 because of the uncertainties and the nuisances it cause with the limitations on licensing. It would be MUCH better if it was sold with hardware dongle, or a smart software dongle, which would NOT lock the license to a specific computer hardware and should NOT limit commercial use.

...in the meantime, since I posted last time in this thread, I bought a UC300ETH with UCCNC. I know now that Mach4 is out of my game for me and is no longer something I consider ever buying. Mach3 and UCCNC is all I ever need... well, "ever" is a very long time, but today I can't really see to ever wanting it and definitely not until the license conditions are not changed.

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Originally Posted by CitizenOfDreams

I see. Well, that makes sense then, although I'm sure the DIYers (who are the most likely to use the parallel port interface) are not particularly happy to pay extra.

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I am pretty sure that DIY users are about to give up on parallel ports also. It is becoming more an more a dinosaur and W10 is no longer supporting it. Buying something today for pp use is a bit weird today. Both Ethernet and USB are better than pp in my opinion, and motion controllers are available at a reasonable price even for hobby users. I mean, can a $100 extra really motivate use of pp today? A machine + VFD + spindle easily cost around $2000, so a hundred more makes no real difference.

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Originally Posted by CNCMAN172

The people on the forum who have been using machines with no issues tend to be the ones with the higher end motion controllers like Vital Systems,

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The pricing for a Mach4 license plus one of those is close to that of a commercial grade, stand alone machine controller from China, I bought Mach3 before they stopped support and development, I'll be going to stand alone controllers rather than Mach4,

- Nick

I would like to pick up this thread to see if anyone has anymore opinions of Mach4, I tried som things with it half a year ago and I had som problems.
Could it be said that its stable now? are most bugs solved?

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Originally Posted by magicniner

The pricing for a Mach4 license plus one of those is close to that of a commercial grade, stand alone machine controller from China, I bought Mach3 before they stopped support and development, I'll be going to stand alone controllers rather than Mach4,

- Nick

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I'm wondering why do you think the chinese manuf will forever support and develop your standalone controller?
It is a known issue with most chinese electronics that they don't care about support especially not about long term support of their products. they just develop a new version and you are then out of luck when asking for support or replacement parts or repair.

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Originally Posted by OlfCNC

I'm wondering why do you think the chinese manuf will forever support and develop your standalone controller?
It is a known issue with most chinese electronics that they don't care about support especially not about long term support of their products. they just develop a new version and you are then out of luck when asking for support or replacement parts or repair.

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I agree on that one, I have bought and sold several motion controllers from China and all of them have had the same "develop, ready, sell, no more developing" syndrome.
I work mostly with UCCNC now and I think that its great and CNC-drive is constantly working to improve both the software and the motion controllers.
But some of my customers want Mach4 and I´m not confident that I can recommend it yet?

Educate them.

jeeybee,

I have purchased Mach3 and Mach4. I also own the KFLOP which comes with KmotionCNC. Honestly, Mach4 lost a good deal of market share due to the very long delay in the release, and when it finally came out it had very limited support for motion control hardware. The package is clearly designed for motion controllers, however they do have a $25 plugin for the Parallel port from Art. If you download and play with Mach4 the first thing you will notice is the screen set is probably one of the nicest features, just beautiful and very well thought out. I have it running with the Ethernet Smoothstepper and the motion is very fluid. I have my Mach4 machine 80% finished and have homing, pendant, and spindle control all working. I am in the middle of rebuilding that machine so built a brand new control box with ESS and all the sourcing hardware. I can move the machine very nice just doing some of the final mechanical aspects of the machine and have been side tracked with my wife's projects for months. I can load gcode and it runs very smooth. Their support for other motion control hardware is growing, the latest version of hobby is 4.2.0.3390 which I just downloaded this morning. They also have the industrial version which is where I think they have spent so much of their time the last year or so, but that is way beyond the hobby crowd. I would download it and give it a try. The challenge is the unlicensed version only run maybe five minutes so you can't really do much testing. I still run a machine with Mach3 which still runs just fine. If you are looking to buy a hardware motion controller, the KFLOP is very well supported, and their KmotionCNC software is rock solid. It never goes off and does something unexpected, so that aspect I just love. If KmotionCNC had the Mach4 front end it would be a one stop shop for me. So for me I run three machines and they all have their strong and weak points.

Russ

I bought Mach 4 on the original offer but didn't start to use it until about 6 months ago. I use it on my lathe and milling machine along with Pokey57cnc motion controllers and CNC-drives.
I am totally happy with this setup. I have no reservations on using "feed hold" or "run from here", both of which were squirrelly in Mach 3, at least for me. The "Lathe cycles" are a set of well thought out wizards, much better than those in M3.
My one caveat is that I am unable to construct screensets which I did in M3. M4 uses LUA language as opposed to VB and at my age I'm unable to wrap my head around LUA. The built in screen designer facilitates creating new layouts, but I'm unable to do totally new stuff.
Mach 4 is not Mach 3, it's a bit different; it's a big improvement.
Cheers,
Ozzie

Couple things.. (I use linuxcnc but have evaluated mach3/4 - certainly do your own research).
-Mach 4 has the same trajectory planner as mach 3. They have tried to add some bandaids to help path following (you can set a max feedrate for each degree 0-179deg) But you really don't know how well mach is following your desired path. (most controls have some sort of path tolerance. ie - linuxcnc has G64P.005 - Go as fast as you can but stay within .005 of programmed path.)
-mach4 really does require you to know how to program. Seems if you want to do anything - you need to learn lua. (not that that is a bad thing...) (this was a false complaint of linuxcnc)
-printer port (darwin) is pretty limited. (no THC, Backlash or threading)
-Still no stable release. (for some definition of stable)
-very limited on hardware and what is supported. (backlash, lathe threading, and such all has to be implemented in the external motion cards.)
-not opensource ;)


sam

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Originally Posted by ger21

I haven't really looked at Mach4 at all in the last year, so I don't really know the current state.

I purchased a license 2 years ago, but have no plans to ever use Mach4 as of right now.



Artsoft has stated multiple times on that the Mach4 hobby license is basically the same as the Mach3 license. You don't have to buy the Industrial version if you're making money.
I've brought up the issue of the wording on the website, and in their opinion there was no need to change it, even though imo it's completely different than their explanation.

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Has that changed? Are you still not using Mach4?

I'm running a 4-axis desktop mill on Mach-3, it does great work.
I'm building a new 4-Axis mill based on a Chinese stand alone controller.
My new VMC, due in the New Year, has a Siemens 808D Advanced controller, Siemens Drives and Siemens Servos

Mach-4 spent so long as a semi-functional solution badly supported and developed by a lacklustre team that it will never gain the market penetration which Mach-3 enjoyed.
The fact that the developer of MAch-3 had to produce the PP Plug In for Mach-4 which the new owners initially claimed wasn't possible shows what a Shower they are! ;-)

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Originally Posted by magicniner

Mach-4 spent so long as a semi-functional solution badly supported and developed by a lacklustre team that it will never gain the market penetration which Mach-3 enjoyed.

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I can't say much about the development team of Mach4, but I think that one major reason why Mach3 became so widely spread was the fact the the license key was cracked and the cracked software was included in many cheap kits. This had a major impact on it's popularity because it is very good and not many paid for their licenses. This of course ruined the future of Mach3, but at the same time, it sort of ruined other software development as well, since it is very difficult to match a "free" software like Mach3. I think this will never happen again with any other similar software.

The market is too diversified now with too many hobby / low end commercial offerings now.

Artsoft did a bad thing by not planning for mach4 enough in advance, and then offered the market a beta solution whilst stopping development of mach3 but still using it as a cash cow by still selling licences.

I have come to realise no software / motion controller does it all well. Hence I use a mixed solution now.

UCCNC for plasma, mill and router.
Mach3 for scanything (camera scanner / edge tracer)
Mach4 for turning / lathe.

I use a UC300eth motion controller for UCCNC and mach3 and a pokeys 57E for mach4 (with encoder spindle sync for threading)

UCCNC will ONLY work with cncdrives UC motion controllers, this allows for better code by managed code which is 100% compatible with the motion controller and motion controller functions.

But CNC Drive provide mach3 and mach4 plugins for all their motion controllers so they are a cross platform solution if you want flexibility. No their mach4 plugin does not do threading or plasma THC, but their mach3 one does.

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Originally Posted by MachineRising

Has that changed? Are you still not using Mach4?

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No. As I said, I have no plan to ever use it. There are just a lot of things I don't like about it.

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but I think that one major reason why Mach3 became so widely spread was the fact the the license key was cracked and the cracked software was included in many cheap kits.

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That's why it continues to be so popular. That and the fact that companies like CNC Router Parts still prefers Mach3 over Mach4.
Artsoft probably still sells copies of Mach3 than Mach4, even though it's been an abandoned product for 5 years. They can't afford to stop selling their inferior product, because nobody likes their new improved version.

The reason Mach3 became so popular, is because it was the only viable Windows based hobby control for a looong time.

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Originally Posted by robertspark

The market is too diversified now with too many hobby / low end commercial offerings now.

Artsoft did a bad thing by not planning for mach4 enough in advance, and then offered the market a beta solution whilst stopping development of mach3 but still using it as a cash cow by still selling licences.

I have come to realise no software / motion controller does it all well. Hence I use a mixed solution now.

UCCNC for plasma, mill and router.
Mach3 for scanything (camera scanner / edge tracer)
Mach4 for turning / lathe.

I use a UC300eth motion controller for UCCNC and mach3 and a pokeys 57E for mach4 (with encoder spindle sync for threading)

UCCNC will ONLY work with cncdrives UC motion controllers, this allows for better code by managed code which is 100% compatible with the motion controller and motion controller functions.

But CNC Drive provide mach3 and mach4 plugins for all their motion controllers so they are a cross platform solution if you want flexibility. No their mach4 plugin does not do threading or plasma THC, but their mach3 one does.

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Thank you, that is the kind of information I am looking for.

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Originally Posted by magicniner

I'm running a 4-axis desktop mill on Mach-3, it does great work.
I'm building a new 4-Axis mill based on a Chinese stand alone controller.
My new VMC, due in the New Year, has a Siemens 808D Advanced controller, Siemens Drives and Siemens Servos

Mach-4 spent so long as a semi-functional solution badly supported and developed by a lacklustre team that it will never gain the market penetration which Mach-3 enjoyed.
The fact that the developer of MAch-3 had to produce the PP Plug In for Mach-4 which the new owners initially claimed wasn't possible shows what a Shower they are! ;-)

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Thanks

I'm building a 4 axis router. The long axis is currently slated to slave two motors. The forth axis will be in the form of a lathe. What would be your solution for this. Cost is a serious consideration, but not at the expense of acceptable performance and quality. I have 3 Teknic 3734 servo motors from an industrial robot I designed years ago. The drivers use step and direction, like stepper motors.

I'm building a similar machine, but with two Z axis.
I'm using UCCNC, with the UC300ETH and a UB1 breakout board.

Another option would be the Centroid Acorn. It currently won't control the 5 motors you need, but they are beta testing some new hardware that supposedly will, but there's not much info on it right now.