[Blacksunshine]

Can mach 3 run off of the new lap tops or net books?
Im looking at a new pc, but none of them have a old style printer port, and I recal reading somewhere that mach 3 can not run a cnc through a usb port.
What are my options?

Thanks for any info.

[laszlozoltan]

without wanting to sound sarcastic or "smarmy" I honestly would have to say the ball is in mach 3's court to get with the times. Send them an email and see what they suggest for their product; perhaps they have a modification or update in the works.

[ger21]

Can mach 3 run off of the new lap tops or net books?

Fwiw, Mach3 has never supported the use of laptops, even those with parallel ports.

There are several options to use Mach3 without a parallel port. They will all cost at least twice as much, as they require additional hardware to do the step pulsing.

Two USB options are the SmoothStepper and the KFlop.

[79TigerPilot]

I think lots of folks run Mach3 with a laptop using an external motion controller like SmoothStepper and I am sure there are folks that get away with using the PP on a laptop.

Two of the main design goals for any laptop designer are to extend battery life and keep the CPU and support chips cool. The problem with using a laptop is one does not know what sorts of things are done in the bios and or hardware, independent of the OS to achieve both these goals.

For one they like to keep the voltage as low as possible to reduce the current draw, so is the PP fully compliant with full drive and voltage swings. Is their enough drive to forward bias the opto-isolator in servo driver board at full pulsing speed or did they do just enough to run an Epsom printer. Did they skimp on the hardware and make the PP using a USB port and USB to PP converter chip, this doesn't work.

Then we have the cooling issues, what happens when the CPU gets a little hot, do they shift the clock down some till things cool off, do they turn parts of the board or the chip off? One does not know. Have they done some power saving tricks independent of APCI to extend battery life?

I think this is why some folks can make it work fine and others have nothing but problems. The only way to know is to try it but be on the lookout for issues.

Craig

[CbrViking]

There is another product I found but have not used made by a company named SUMWIN in China. I would really like to know how well it works because it has the breakout box built in.