Originally Posted by
joeavaerage
Hi,
I have used an ESS for years. It has both a Mach3 and a Mach4 plugin so you can use either.
The ESS has three output ports, each replicating a parallel port but with an IDC socket rather than a DB25 socket. With an IDC to DB25 cable you can plug
your breakout board into one port of the ESS, no redesign required. You can of course have a second, or even third, breakout board for more inputs and outputs.
It has become common for ESS users to buy an MB3 breakout board (CNCRoom) which the ESS plugs into and it has ALL three ports developed for 51 inputs and outputs.
I made my own breakout board and it too has all three ports developed, and I currently use 34 of the available 51 inputs and outputs.
Eight years ago I used Mach3 and a parallel port, then later two parallel ports. It worked well. Then I decided to get an ESS, mainly to be able to try out Mach4, but in the first instance
I stuck with Mach3. I found that the smoothness of motion and the stability/accuracy of the ESS was such that I could increase my accelerations and max velocity of my machine by a third
over the exact same machine and parallel ports. I was of the opinion the parallel ports were good......but they are poor by comparison to an ESS.
The ESS, in fact all of the external motion controllers like a 57CNC, UC100 or UC300, can all use 64bit PC's. Mach itself runs on just about any PC, 32 bit or 64 bit, from Windows XP,
and even earlier, through Windows 11. Machs parallel port will ONLY operate on 32 bit Windows 7 or earlier, and desktop units at that. Thus an external controller will allow you a much
wider choice of useful PC hardware, possibly one of the kids cast-off laptops for example.
Mach is not in itself a power hungry application. I have used Mach4 for seven years now and it runs on the same Mini-ITX single board PC that I used with Mach3 and two parallel ports.
The PC has a dual core Atom CPU, with on-chip graphics.....so all-in-all a very low power/spec PC, yet it runs Mach4 no trouble. The only time I notice the lack of processing power
is if I load a large (ish) Gcode file, say 10Mb or bigger, it can take a minute or so to load and draw the toolpath. After the initial load and draw it works perfectly.
Craig