Hi All

I am loving my Ethernet smoothstepper motion control hardware.
Recently had to swap in a new machine controller PC to run Mach3 and would like to pass on the benefit of this experience.

To get the ESS board to talk to the Ethernet port of the machine controller with its now fixed IP address, you must move the jumper on the ESS board to short it.
This allows the board to go into programming mode to set its IP address.
This part is reasonably well documented.

Initially it is probably best to turn off the windows firewall to allow the configurator to talk to the ESS board and program it ... simple enough.
However when turning the firewall back on it is important to allow both the Configurator and Mach3 through the firewall on BOTH the private and Public networks.

Despite having entries that allowed the Configurator and Mach3 through the firewall my initial installation was still having problems.
The reason for this was that I had separate entries for the applications in the firewall to allow access to the private and public networks.
For the everything to work properly you must have only one entry for Mach3 with both the public and private networks allowed and one entry for the configurator with both networks allowed.

I hope this speeds other installations of this great piece of hardware.

Regards
Surfmachine