Smooth Steppers are finally available in UK !

[Jonathan]

3 weeks ago

It's been a fair bit longer if you insist on bringing it up and I've been aware of the advantages of linuxCNC for years. I just waited to see if it was actually as difficult to use as people claimed, so I was better informed before promoting it, and it turned out to be just fine. If you think I was magically converted 3 weeks ago, you are wrong. For what it's worth, my machine has now done over 100 hours cutting since switching to linuxCNC and since the start achieved higher feed-rates then I ever got with mach3. They were high enough before, but it shows the system is more stable.

Why if he's so knowledgeable and helpful for others did he not sort out why Mach wouldn't work in his case ? Is it because he can't ?

I estimated that installing linuxCNC would be faster than continuing lengthy diagnostics on my machine and I had wanted to try it for a long time anyway, so I went for it. Mach3 worked for me for the most part so there was no reason to change.
As usual, this has nothing to do with my original point.

141,750,000

Unlike the vast majority of those 142M, my friend has been in a Russian school in the past 15 years, in central Moscow, which has better funded schools than most of the country. There are around 60,000 schools in Russia (confirmed in numerous places on google), so I take 'the vast majority' to mean you've sold >30,000 CNC machines? Anyway, it would appear that you're under the impression that I'm calling you a liar. I'll say it again: I'm not, I think it's likely that you're exaggerating and if you confirm that 30,000 Sieg CNC machines have been sold to Russia, then I'll happily put my hands up and admit my suspicions were wrong. Anyway, even if you sold twenty trillion billion cnc machines to every country in the world, and they ALL ran MACH, that would still be an argumentum ad populum.
Having been linked to a few Russian forums it seems that LinuxCNC has a far bigger presence there and is actually more popular on the biggest Russian forum I could find: http://www.cnc-club.ru/forum/index.php

supping vodka [ which I hate ] from 45 gallon drums.

No wonder you consider having big buttons an advantage...

[John S]

Whatever................

[Lee Roberts]

I have tried to keep out of this for as long as possible, But I feel I must say something.

I am all for heated debates, but this is a public forum, and I must say that this topic does not look good for the forum/site, and in fact if this was my forum I would be dam right ashamed of topics like this.

I share your frustrations.

If heated debates are going to get like this more and more, maybe it might be an idea for a "Heated Debate Section" within the forums.

Sorry if anything said has offended anyone, I have recently been absent from following the forums in my usual religious fashion due to my mother in law passing away two weeks ago yesterday, I’ve had a significant role to play in giving my support and obviously getting over her death myself, we have been very close and played big roles in each other’s lives over recent years, so it’s been quite a hard two weeks for me/us and what’s going on in the forum hasn’t been on my mind if I’m honest.

If there is any threads needing my attention please send me a PM with the details so I can take a look and I will do my best.

I have cleaned this thread up best I can with what I’ve got to work with, I am happy for people to have discussions and debates and even correct each other when wrong. However we all know how to talk to each other in a courteous way and how to put our points across without directly attacking each other.

History repeating its self...

Snore...zzzz....snooze...

I remind you of the rules you all agreed to when you applied for an account:

By agreeing to these rules, you warrant that you will not post any messages that are obscene, vulgar, sexually-oriented, hateful, threatening, or otherwise violative of any laws.


The owners of MYCNCUK reserve the right to remove, edit, move or close any content item for any reason.

You know what I expect from you people, do me a favour and play the game or I will just take the ball away. I’m getting tired of this now and I don’t want to read you being objectionable to each other and nor do others, you know who you are and it needs to stop. Applications for an account are free of course; however membership is granted and is just as easily revoked, regardless of the outcome and punitive measures will be taken against persistent offenders and it will not be up for discussion like it has previously.

Good evening gentlemen !

[ptjw7uk]

Thank you Lee for making a very pertinate point.
I for one only look on here for information and as such is not interested in point scoring if I was i would only have to look in any newspaper!
Lets keep the machining information flowing after all thats what the forum is for!
peter

[boldford]

And after reading this whole thread I'm none the wiser whether to go for LinuxCNC or Mach.

[rnr107]

And after reading this whole thread I'm none the wiser whether to go for LinuxCNC or Mach.

Note that I started the thread to tell people about the availability of the Smoothstepper motor board in UK !
Nothing to do with a fight between Pro-Mach vs Pro-Linux...

But, life goes on mate !

[JAZZCNC]

And after reading this whole thread I'm none the wiser whether to go for LinuxCNC or Mach.

Tell you what then put up a thread poll asking whether Mach or Linux user and see who has the largest user base.?

CNC folks don't tend to use things that don't work has it's none productive and very frustrating. Every software has it's problems and issues or special area's where it shines but the real difference and where it counts is when you do have an issue how quick you can get info or fix for the problem.? . . . The user base will reflect this.!!

[Jonathan]

Tell you what then put up a thread poll asking whether Mach or Linux user and see who has the largest user base.?

As I mentioned earlier in the thread, just because something is more popular doesn't necessarily mean it is the best. Plus, although it is clear that Mach3 is the most popular in England, I don't think you'll find that's the case in some countries.

And after reading this whole thread I'm none the wiser whether to go for LinuxCNC or Mach.

That wasn't the purpose of this thread, but from your previous posts it seems you already use LinuxCNC, so I suggest trying both and see which you like best / which works best. I can't really add any more to the debate than I did in the first couple of posts on the topic.

[boldford]

As a newby I'm just getting to grips with this whole CNC thing.
I think readers here fall into two broad camps. There are those with an IT exposure that want to get into carving real materials and those that manipulate material manually and want to bring in the benefits of NC.

From what I've read to date and my general experience of other M$ based PC S/W I am of the perception that Mach is a slick application which works straight out of the box for most people. Understandably, Art brought success to his application by designing it to run on the World's most popular OS. Unfortunately the M$ OS being closed source means he's pretty much stuck with it, as is, warts and all. Modern PCs are so fast that they can usually mask the inherent non-real time weaknesses of the OS. I'm sure SS is capable of overcoming those timing weaknesses - at the price ($$$ or £££) of throwing more processing power at the job.

On the other hand LinuxCNC sets out to be more flexible, and certainly more precise in the timing domain even with low end processors (P4 or earlier), but to me it seems to be less than friendly to the non-IT geek by failing to be as easy to set up as it could be after the great promise shown during install from an ISO CD. For LinuxCNC to become more popular I would appeal to those within the LinuxCNC fraternity to consider my comments if they intend to port it to 12.04LTS along with a substantial re-write of the manual.

That's just my two-penny-worth; but what do I know?

[bobc]

I use Windows and Linux, I have no philosophical preference. I try to use whatever application has the best price/performance/ease of use, sometimes that means running on Windows sometimes Linux. Perhaps easier for me having multiple boxes, if you have a single box and need to choose that makes it more difficult.

I am sure there is no "right answer" here, it depends on your budget of both time and money, but logically try linuxCNC first because it is free, and then try Mach.