Originally Posted by
joeavaerage
Hi,
I use an Ethernet SmoothStepper by Warp9TD, $195.00USD, as does Roger if I'm not mistaken. Artsoft, now actually called New Fangled Solutions, does not manufacture motion boards. There are a half dozen
credible manufacturers of Mach ready motion boards, not counting the swag of somewhat less credible Chinese motion board manufacturers. Artsoft has NEVER made hardware.
I disagree, Mach predates LinuxCNC. LinuxCNC grew out of EMC2 many years ago, and one of the EMC2 developers, Art Fennerty, branched out and wrote the parallel port driver for Windows which started Mach and hobby CNC. LinuxCNC came later. Given that LinuxCNC is quasi-realtime, it can be a feedback controller, whereas Mach requires certain work arounds to achieve the same result.
It is fair to say that LinuxCNC supports rigid tapping etc 'natively' whereas Mach uses both realtime motion control features or the feedback features of servos, or even more recently Ethercat, a
distributed motion control set up.
You may choose to disbelieve when I say that with AC servos and Mach4 you can achieve perfectly synchronised motion....but I achieve that daily, to the limit of the accuracy of my machine, say 0.01mm.
I rather doubt my machine would be considered accurate or rigid enough to make highly loaded gears such as you describe, but I certainly believe Mach is at least capable of the task.
That's nonsense, Mach predates Centroid by a decade or more.
Virtually nothing. The main thing you get with Industrial is the 'Red Carpet Treatment' from NFS. You also get parametric Gcode programming called MacroB. It has
no more axes, or motors, or is any faster or more accurate or anything else. MacroB is used industrially but it does nothing that regular Gcode cannot but has things
like conditionals ('If' and 'While' loops) in Gcode for example.
Mach4Hobby costs $200USD, one time purchase, that allows up to five separate machines to be licensed, and as many demo copies as you require.
Craig