[ToolMach_Aust]

I bought a Masso last week and to be honest I think its the best thing since sliced bread. I had it installed into my machine in less than an hour and most of it working perfectly. Some of the help is very thin on the website but enough to get it all going. I have sent Jatinda some suggestions about how what to add to the website and he needs to get it in a downloadable PDF. I think the issue is he is busy producing and developing this unit and is basically a one man band and maybe a bit overrun.

The unit is so simple to setup and runs flawlessly and is fast. It looks at 80 line ahead in the code. I bought the 5 axis one but you dont need to you can buy a 3 axis then pay I think 40 bucks for a software upgrade to 4 and 5 axis for 40 bucks each axis. There is a mill and lathe version the hardware is the same. You just pay for what firmware you want if you already own a mill version you can if you want make it a lathe version by uploading that firmware. Not difficult at all.

I built this mill with a PMDX126 and a PMDX107 spindle controller and started it off on Mach3 I then converted it over to LinuxCNC which was a nightmare to get going but ran much better than Mach3 ever did. I was going to convert it to a Mesa motion controller with LinuxCNC and had a test setup I was playing with on a bench but setting up the HAL files is horendous you need to be a programmer so it was very slow to get anything done. I wanted to use a motion controller and get away from computers and parallel ports. I stumbled across the Masso did some research on the net about it and ordered it. There has been a few hiccups getting it interfaced correctly but that really is only lack of some paperwork.

I have been running the machine on it..I have 6nm steppers on this machine and they are 220V steppers so has a fair bit of grunt and the Masso really throws it around. The machine sounds totally different as well. It is much smoother. Even a mate of mine who came over when I was running some Gcode on it to see the motion and accelleration etc commented as soon as he walked in saying Wow that sounds different. I have ordered some servos to fit to this machine and they will be here in a week or two so I will convert it to servos using the Masso and I think it will be just terrific.

The best thing I like about the Masso is it has just the information you need on the screen..no superfuous crap or fancy crap. I saw some comments on another thread about not HDMI...why do you need it??????? VGA is plenty fine for it. I am sure his idea was to make it powerfull in hardware and simple to operate and it certainly is that. At this stage I give it a thumbs up and am very happy with it

Mark