Thanks for the reply. I live in Brisbane (same side as Cairns but a little further south).
My CNC experience is limited to a system I built for my mill to cut clock wheels and pinions. It was designed by a retired engineer in the Sydney Clockmakers Society. It uses two K179 drivers. The power supply is an old computer power supply suitably modified. It runs from a parallel port in an old Dell and controls the cross slide and the dividing head. There are a few pictures in my webpage
https://timewithcharacter.org/2015/0...-clock-making/. It is controlled by a menu driven system and worked extremely well. He subsequently modified it to run from a USB and used a Stepper B++ stepper driver. I built that as well but had less success than I did with the first version.
It whetted my appetite for going further with CNC and when I saw Franco's youtubes using Mach3 Wizard on a lathe similar to mine I was hooked. I was able to get the Wizard program he demonstrated to run in simulation but getting the ports and pins sorted was a larger problem.. After that it just got messy with unrelated matters getting in the way and then the Dell decided to take early retirement.
I now have another Dell also with a parallel port and am getting close to powering up a new board that I got from Stepperline.
Initially a lot of the stuff I read on this site was as clear to me as trying to communicate in Swahili but I have slowly picked up the lingo. I don't have a problem spending the money if I am actually heading towards a solution but after my experience with Topcnc am a bit cautious. Smooth steppers are expensive before you even pay for a Mach licence.
If Acorn actually does what it claims to do, it would be the ideal solution for somebody with my entry level expertise. It also seems to be a cheaper solution when you add smooth stepper and mach license costs together. I will just take it slowly and see what happens with my current Mach 3 project and then make a decision about what to do next.
Woodie