Re: Mach 3 vs. UCCNC- any thoughts / experience ?
mach 3 can be used with parallel ports and a variety of usb or either net controls . uccnc can only be used with their hardware .
Mach pretty much covers the typical g codes that are needed . Uccnc is missing a number of codes g18 g19 , g40 g41 g42 g99.
Uccnc is supposed to be faster than mach but I personally can't test that because uc would probably crash my mills fast due to the missing codes .
I can't speak for the stability of uc but I find mach to be quite stable . The computers for my mills rarely get shut down and mach is always running , I can leave the mills for a week and they are ready to go without any hiccups . One mill does get jittery every few weeks so I need to reboot but I blame the pc and not mach for that problem .
I use the uc hardware with mach and I considered giving the software a try but it won't do what I need . I was looking to do some upgrades in hopes that I could knock back my cycle times . The better solution was simply to buy a few more mills vs the few minutes that I can shave of an hour of machine time
If I was starting fresh then I wouldn't bother with either and I'd go straight for mach 4 , I'm sure there are some bugs to work out because its new , and though i don't like the looks of it , It is pretty clean looking and a lot of good thought has gone into it's development .
A poet knows no boundary yet he is bound to the boundaries of ones own mind !! ........