hi. i built a cnc mini mill a few months ago and made lots of chips using mach 3 and ESS in demo mode i ran into the 500 line limit and it really bugged me. i dont really want to pay the near 200 usd for mach3(which has lots of annoying problems i cant fix). i got a new pc for the mill (lenovo thinkcentre m57) and decided to try linuxcnc. im running it off of the parallel port now. i dont like the performance drop after using the ethernetsmoothstepper, but linux cnc seems to work pretty well.
i do have an issue though. if i enter m03 or m04 command into mdi, the spindle turns on, but then i can no longer enter any more commands into MDI. i then have to hit the estop and reset to get it to work again. it runs gcode files no problem, just the mdi is messed up. all other gcodes seem to work fine in mdi.
next question is about the mesa 5i25. my pc has a 5v pci bus on it, so i could upgrade to this board. will this give me similar performance to the ESS?
after about 1 hour the latency test says i have 42945 and 12666.