Smooth Steppers are finally available in UK !

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Originally Posted by John S

3 weeks ago

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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.

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Originally Posted by John S

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 ?

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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.

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Originally Posted by John S

141,750,000

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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

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Originally Posted by John S

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

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

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

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Originally Posted by Mad Professor

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.

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I share your frustrations.

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Originally Posted by Mad Professor

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.

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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:

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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.

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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 !

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

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

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Originally Posted by boldford

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

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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 ! :very_drunk:

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Originally Posted by boldford

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

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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.!!

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Originally Posted by JAZZCNC

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by boldford

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

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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.

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?

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.

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Originally Posted by Jonathan

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.

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Yes and I don't disagree in some respects and certainly wasn't saying Mach3 was better than linux cnc.!! Each has it's own set of skills and weakness's.!!. . BUT we do live in UK and tend to work within the English speaking domains like Cnczone etc so this does become important.! Very important to some people who haven't got IT skills and don't want to learn Geek.!!
They need good sources of information and help from friendly more experienced users, I know the result of such a poll. . . But it will show to others just how wide the user base for each software really is.!! . . . This can then be used has a guide to help them decide if this holds any value to them.?

Just read through this, and wanted to point out some unfair comments.

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Originally Posted by Jonathan

The main advantage of LinuxCNC over Mach3 using a parallel port is it runs on a real time kernel. This ensures that the pulse output from the parallel port has priority over everything else on the computer, so you don't get the timing inaccuracies inherent to Mach3 from Windows interrupting. With LinuxCNC if the computer appears to 'freeze' the machine will still run happily, since it's prioritised over everything including the mouse/keyboard. No matter how much you disable things in Windows, remove programs or whatever fundamentally Mach3 is not real time so timing errors will exist.

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99.9% of issues with Windows "interrupting" Mach3 are power saving features, which can easily be disabled in most cases. Often they can be disabled from the bios, and may not be Windows issues at all.

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No matter how much you disable things in Windows, remove programs or whatever fundamentally Mach3 is not real time so timing errors will exist.

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Mach3 actually controls Windows to a certain extent, to provide accurate timing. And because it's a buffered system, "real time" is not really an issue. Sure, it may prevent you from doing some things that Linux can do, but there are no timing errors as you claim.

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'But I'm not a computer geek and it takes twenty thousand years to set up' I hear you cry! It really doesn't - the installation and setup process which apparently is such a huge barrier to many, is quicker, easier and more intuitive than windows/mach3. Owning a CNC machine makes you a geek to start with so it's too late for that anyway. In fact, the interface eliminates many human errors - I see countless problems from people setting the wrong value for steps/mm, whereas in linuxcnc, each pulley has its own textbox, meaning that you never have to do any fiddly arithmetic manually.

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If you want to play that game, Mach3 will automatically set your steps/unit without entering anything but a measured distance. You don't even need to know what components your machine uses.

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Another crucial disadvantage of Mach3, or rather windows is its inability to perform on low end computers - with some ebay sniping (gixen.com), it's possible to put together a low latency computer for less than £50, whereas with windows, if you want to get anywhere, you have to use a relatively expensive computer.

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When Mach3 was originally developed (Mach3, not Mach1 or Mach2), 1.5Ghz PC's were state of the art. I run Mach3 on a $20 1Ghz PC with 512MB of RAM, and it runs great. I can buy PC's on Ebay all day long that will run Mach3 just fine for $50-$75. Including Windows XP

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LinuxCNC also boasts superior stability. Windows is known for its tendency to crash for no good reason on mid to low end computers ...................................

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Really??? Maybe if your running Windows 95. From Windows 2K on, Windows is extremely stable, and will usually only crash for two reasons. Faulty hardware (usually memory), or bad software (very rare). I haven't seen Windows crash in well over 10 years.

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Look at what features come into play when a product is developed properly with the correct objective in mind - full support for helical arcs (allowing threadmilling).................................... ..............

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MAch3 can do helical arcs and threadmilling too.

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Mach3 runs on windows 2000 and windows XP. Both are in steady decline with windows vista, 7 and 8 being forced out by Microsoft.

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Mach3 runs on Vista and Windows 7 as well as 2K and XP. It can't use the parallel port with Windows 8, though.

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Ubuntu is made to be incredibly user friendly and simple (it's marketed at Apple users amongst others).

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Apple users use whatever Apple feeds them. I can't see many apple users switching to Linux.

In a desperate attempt to steer the thread back on topic, does any here use Smoothstepper board, and if so what do they think of them?

On a technical note, the Smoothstepper board appears to use a Xilinx FPGA to do the crunching, and I guess an FTDI USB chip, is that right?

I don't use one, but there are a tremendous amount of Smoothstepper users at CNC Zone. And most everyone who uses seems to love it.
Yes, I believe it's an FTDI USB chip, as the FTDI driver is on the Smoothstepper site.

The general consensus seems to be that the ethernet SS is the only way to go these days. The USB version has always suffered from noise issues. Some have no problems with it, but a lot of people do. The ESS is said to be pretty much immune to noise.

Thanks, that is interesting. We tried to put in USB to one of our products at work (a motor drive for a vacuum pump), and it failed as soon as the motor started! With improved filtering we can get past that, but we still have trouble with EMC tests. The problem is that the USB falls over, and doesn't recover, which for industrial control is not acceptable.

I think in low noise/office type environments USB is fine, when you get too near heavy kit it is just not up to the job. People's experience seems to match what we have found.

Ethernet does seem like a much better alternative, it's cheap, robust and widely supported.

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The problem is that the USB falls over, and doesn't recover

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That sounds just like what happens. When the Smoothstepper lost the connection, it required Mach3 to be closed and restarted to re-establish the connection.

I've got a USB SS, however it's on a Connect lathe and is hardly pushed.

I've not had any issues with the USB dropping out, however some people do and struggle to fix it.

Yes I have 2 x USB SS and now the Russian Ethernet version (Thou I'm not saying anything on that yet has I've not done testing so please don't ask.)

I have used the SS for 3yrs and it's been great. To get the best immunity from noise causing hanging it needs running from an external 5v supply not the 5V from USB. Other than doing that I've not had any trouble from noise or crashing.

I use it on an old 1ghz celeron Acer laptop without any problems at all.

It made an instant differnce to the machine giving slightly higher speeds and better acceleration with much smoother motion. I have never in all the time using it lost so much has a single step, this is partly down to my running a safe tuning setup but also from the SS being capable of far more than I throw at it.

The way I use Mach is to setup different tuning profiles geared to jog specific types.! IE: for Woods/MDF etc I tune for slightly higher feeds. Aluminium I tune for torque and Mid Accelaration and for 3D/V carving work I tune for high accelration then load what ever profile I feel best for the job.

3D and V/carving are very demanding on the PP because of the high pulse rate needed for accelaration and if your going to have any trouble often it's here where it shows in missed steps or droping/lifting Z axis etc.? . . . .The SS lets allows me high Accelration without worrying about missed steps.

I fully recommend the SS but If buying today I would buy the ESS because it's pretty much immune to the noise issue's that the SS can have in some enviroments (Thou I think thats often the users Electrics bad implimentation more than the SS fault.?)

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Originally Posted by Ger21

99.9% of issues with Windows "interrupting" Mach3 are power saving features

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No, the majority of processor time not devoted to mach3 goes towards keeping the other >30 processes (mostly unnecessary) and many other threads ticking over with background processes. This is obvious. 99.9% is a completely fabricated figure which doesn't reflect reality at all. Additionally just look at the idle CPU useage for a windows machine and then for a Linux machine: even when doing nothing on a high end machine, windows will struggle to flatline at 0, while linux won't.

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Originally Posted by Ger21

but there are no timing errors as you claim.

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There are always​ timing errors, both on Linux and on Windows, the difference being they're lower on Linux. Here's another post on the subject that isn't mine:

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EMC does run in a realtime kernal so all its I/O is realtime. Mach runs in a Buffered system, once the buffer runs there is little to no interaction to the pulse stream.

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Originally Posted by Ger21

Mach3 will automatically set your steps/unit without entering anything but a measured distance.

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I've been over this recently. This introduces a systematic error which limits the accuracy of the machine to the accuracy of what you used to measure that distance. That wizard is best used for something else entirely.

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Originally Posted by Ger21

From Windows 2K on, Windows is extremely stable

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Windows ME was released after windows 2k, and is very widely accepted to be exceptionally unstable, therefore your statement is wrong.

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Originally Posted by Ger21

I haven't seen Windows crash in well over 10 years.

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Either you don't use windows very often, or you are extremely lucky. Anyway, apparently you are under the impression that stability equates to lack of crashing. I regret to inform you that this isn't the case. Linux is simpler, lighter, and bugs get fixed a lot quicker. It stands to reason that it's more stable. If Ubuntu does appear to crash whilst running the machine, then due to the real time kernel the machine will more than likely continue running and thus not loose position.

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Originally Posted by Ger21

Mach3 runs on Vista and Windows 7 as well as 2K and XP

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Fair enough, perhaps I should have said "runs optimally" - Vista and 7 are both considerably heavier than XP (Vista is an absolute joke anyway).

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Originally Posted by Ger21

MAch3 can do helical arcs and threadmilling too.

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My apologies, Mach can do helical arcs (and therefore threadmilling without interpolating), I was misinformed.

I have not said that Mach wont work, or will definitely introduce errors, it's just inherently more likely to than LinuxCNC, hence I advise trying both.

Now I can see how this thread went where it did. Let me make a few points, and then you can have the last word, which I'm sure you will.

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No, the majority of processor time not devoted to mach3 goes towards keeping the other >30 processes (mostly unnecessary) and many other threads ticking over with background processes. This is obvious. 99.9% is a completely fabricated figure which doesn't reflect reality at all. Additionally just look at the idle CPU usage for a windows machine and then for a Linux machine: even when doing nothing on a high end machine, windows will struggle to flatline at 0, while linux won't.

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None of this backs up your point about Windows interrupting Mach3, which it just doesn't do. If it did, Mach3 wouldn't be usable. There are a few well known applications that can wreak havoc with Mach3, and those are well documented (Quicktime is one). But those are not the fault of Windows.

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Windows ME was released after windows 2k, and is very widely accepted to be exceptionally unstable, therefore your statement is wrong.

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Windows ME?? :joker:

I think that response pretty much sums up where your coming from.

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Either you don't use windows very often, or you are extremely lucky.

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I spend about 18 hours a day most days at a Windows PC. I have 7 at home, and use 2 at work. They are 100% stable, with the exception of Firefox being so bloated it can't run on a PC with 2Gigs of RAM at times.

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Anyway, apparently you are under the impression that stability equates to lack of crashing.

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And I said that where?

You said, Windows is known for its tendency to crash for no good reason.

I said that no, it doesn't crash.

Mach3 works fine, plain and simple. It doesn't work on all PC's, though, but neither does LinuxCNC. The Smoothstepper allows you to use a PC that might not normally work with Mach3. Back on topic.

(Sorry, guys)

No need to apologise Gerry, most of us are on the same page.

Reminds me of a sign my brother used to have hanging in his dealership.

"Employ a teenager whist they still know it all "

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Originally Posted by John S

Reminds me of a sign my brother used to have hanging in his dealership.

"Employ a teenager whist they still know it all "

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Well thats him bolloxed then because I belive he's just turned 20 or about too.??

Anyway I'm just annoyed I didn't put money on the fact he'd argue back with someone of Gerry's experience. . .Infact I'd put good money on he'd argue with Art if he posted.!!!

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Originally Posted by JAZZCNC

Well thats him bolloxed then because I belive he's just turned 20 or about too.??

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Doesn't mean anything, i have a grand daughter who's 9 going on 35, some people go the other way!!

Double post