Quote Originally Posted by Ger21 View Post
There is no perfect control for everyone. If there was, then there wouldn't be so many different ones available.

I just don't see the Acorn as the holy grail of cnc as so many other do.
There are other controls that offer more, for less money.
The Acorn has some advantages in some areas, and others have advantages in other areas.

If the Acorn is what you're looking for, than by all means go out and buy it.
I decided to go with UCCNC, which is a better fit for me.

My UCCNC setup (UC300ETH + UB1 breakout board) is roughly the same price as the Acorn with the $99 pro level software.
The Acorn gives you 4 motors, UCCNC gives you 6.
The Acorn has 8 outputs, the UB1 has 14.
The Acorn has 8 inputs, the UB1 has 23 + 2 analog inputs.

The Acorn does have software advantages.
UCCNC does not have rotary axis support at this time. It will eventually, but it might be a year or two.
UCCNC does not have screw mapping.
UCCNC does not have cutter comp, but it will soon, as it's been under development for a few months now.
I believe that the Acorn is much better at digitizing, but it's limited unless you buy the $499 software upgrade.

It all comes down to what you need from your control.
Interesting. I'm new to DIY CNC, and I'm curious to know what one would do with all those inputs and outputs on the UC300eth? Are those actually similar to the 8 outputs on the Acorn? After reading the documentation on the Acorn, they call them "PLC outputs" which seems identical to what commercial CNC has always called spare M-codes, whereby you can control external things via M-code, and the acorn ones are even programmable as latching or non-latching, under full ladder control. This is exactly what commercial CNC controls have had forever - are you saying UCCNC has this too?

I have downloaded the UCCNC software and played with it, fell in love with it and swore this was the direction I was going to go until I realized it didn't have cutter comp, fanuc macro B and some other things. Those were deal killers for me. I've grown up my entire professional life around Fanuc, Mori Seiki and Okuma, and the Centroid hardware+software was the first control system I came across where I said "ah, here it is." Then after some homework, it made sense in that they've been a commercial CNC house for a long time just now crossing over to the DIY world, whereas these other solutions I've been looking at started out in the DIY world, pushing more and more to match the commercial feature set.

By the way, I've enjoyed seeing your website for a while now.