Novakon has, for some time, been very interested in moving to a better motion controller and software for their machines. I have been working with them to survey the options, and help make the selection, hence the reason I've been "interviewing" motion controllers and software lately.

I'm happy to report, we have settled on the UCCNC ETH-400. The hardware part of this is a small Ethernet motion controller very similar to the current SmoothStepper, in form-factor, but with a number of very significant advantages, the MOST important being that, while it can run with Mach3, it can also be run with UCCNCs own controller software. After spending a few days playing with both hardware and software, I am quite impressed by both the hardware and software.

To start, hardware and software configuration was incredibly quick easy. In fact, about 10 minutes after unpacking the board, it was installed, largely configured, and moving all three axes and the spindle on my Pulsar, including having the necessary functionality for rigid tapping. I spent about half a day really studying how best to configure things, and ended up making a few changes, particularly to the spindle configuration, to make it operate even better.

The configuration dialogs in the UCCNC software are very straight-forward - much more-so than those in Mach3, with everything logically arranged, so all the settings for each axis are easy to find, as they are all in one place. As an added bonus, I was able to free up two output signals, with no loss of functionality! For Pulsar owners, a very simple hardware change will even enable peck-rigid-tapping using canned cycles, and spindle indexing!

The GUI is, overall, quite intuitive, and provides all the functionality most users would ever need or want. It is very logically organized, so the learning curve is relatively short. Documentation is also very good, and kept up-to-date with each new release.

Perhaps the best feature of the whole system is that almost everything is highly configurable, and through a FAR better, easier interface than those available with Mach3. Since the whole controller application is written using Microsoft .NET, plug-ins can be written using ANY .NET language - c#, c++, VisualBasic, Pascal, COBOL, Javascript, etc.. Plug-ins and macros are fully supported, along with a far more sophisticated "macro-pump" capability. Custom screensets are fully supported, and anyone who has done a Mach3 screenset should find them fairly easy to do. Custom M-codes are easy as well. It supports MODBUS, and while there is plenty of support for off-the-shelf pendants and other peripherals, even a custom pendant or other controller is fairly easily do-able. Supporting my ATC, for example, I expect will be only an afternoons work.

And, the software is still under active development, with new features being added on a regular basis. I am actually looking forward to retiring the custom controller application I wrote for the KFlop and switching to a UCCNC controller with my own screenset!

Regards,
Ray L.