Originally Posted by
joeavaerage
Hi,
I rather suspect that trying to use the existing control box will be very hard, one because it is old technology and two because you have no manufacturer support.
I personally use Mach4 and an Ethernet SmoothStepper and have done for nearly ten years and is my recommendation......but please note I am biased!!!
Another good choice is UCCNC and one of their motion controllers like the UC300. It is a very fair competitor to Mach4 in term of price and capability.
No conversation about CNC control systems would be complete without mentioning LinuxCNC. It runs on a real-time capable distro of Linux. It is best matched with one of the Mesa control boards.
It is very capable, in fact universally capable if you are OK with Linux and coding in C. LinuxCNC is free and open source very appealing...if you like Linux.
Centroid Acorn is a more 'turn key' commercial solution. It may lack some of the flexibility of the other solutions, but is pretty well polished. Once you start adding extra features like a wireless pendant, and
the 'Pro' version of the CNC software the price starts to go up, but many Centroid Acorn users report excellent results.
There are other solutions like Masso, Edging, PlanetCNC and an even greater number of Gcode sender types typified by GRBL, all worthy of investigation, the the first four of my recommendations are the top of my list.
Craig