CNCdrive UC300ETH Mach3 plugin is now available

[John S]

I'll back Jazz on this and throw a bit of history into the ring.

I started off converting standard bench top Mills into CNC and bought what we could get hold of.
At that time Arturo Duncan over at CNC4PC was doing opto isolated cards but when fitted to the drivers of the day, also opto isolated they crawled, big time and we got him to bring a non isolated card out on just the motor outputs so you only had one opto, the one in the drive.

This was called the C11G board, G standing for Gecko. we bought many but they were not reliable and what sealed it was we had to pay about
£16 to £19 in import duty, handling and VAT for each card. Not a problem until cards went back for repair and we got hit for anout £16 - £19 because he was too idle to mark it returned unit - FOC.

We paid for one card 3 times and I kid you not, that was the end of it and we also got Sieg over in China to swap to a Chinese sourced card that in 500 ? unit only ever failed once when a heat sink fell off the 7805 chip and shorted something out.

At the same time looking for something cheaper we tried the System 3 cards from DIYCNC. Even though we had Roy down at our place to show him cards not working correctly we still covered a few thousand miles sorting his problems out at our expense. We even took cards and computers back to his place to show they wouldn't work together.

At this time Sieg got into the turnkey CNC market and we flew to China to do a deal with them. WE built the first KX1 in my workshop and it was sent to China with all the drawings. It did actually get returned at one point which I never expected and it's still up in my hayloft. Very similar to what they turned out in production but for some reason it's opposite handed as regards motors on the X and the cabinet, not that it matters.
We didn't make a KX3, they scaled the KX1 up.

I do know how many have been produced as we do world wide web support on them, correction, world wide except Asia and Russia.
However I can't disclose that figure but it is in the tens of thousands.

It's always the little problems as Jazz says that trip you up, silly things that with a bit of fore sight would not happen.

As well as building machines I also deliver some and train users. Up to a few years ago we also used to attend shows with a KX1 and a KX3 in cabinets so they could run under power cutting steel, always steel at shows.

It's because of probably this unique situation in the UK that I know a lot of what people want and expect from a machine or attendant software.

Jazz is unique in that he works on routers, I work on lathes and mills, believe it or not, totally different animals. A mill can work fine on a USB card as the speeds are very much slower than the kernel speed the computer is able to reach. On a mill or lathe the controller is always waiting for the machine unlike a router which can easily outrun the controller, especially if servo's are used.

I watched the video and frankly I wasn't impressed. You quote 10,000mm /min speed but on a machine such as yours you don't have the room and I'll bet it never gets over 2500mm / min
I'm certain that a standard mill running a standard copy of M3 could do this file the same.
Perhaps UCCNC is capable of more but it will take it to be installed on a larger machine than that. I feel the file doesn't do justice to the software