Mach3 Screensets

[m_c]

I suspect the problem with Mach and external motion controllers is to do with how oem/userDROs are allocated and updated.

I know when I was still running Mach3 on the lathe, I couldn't use the threading wizard directly, as I unknowingly used the same UserDRO for transferring the current turret position from the KFlop to Mach, that the wizard used for the thread pitch (it was ok if the pitch I wanted happened to match the current turret position though!). It took me a while to figure that out, but by that time I was in the habit of generating any required code on the laptop anyway, so never bothered changing what userDRO was being used.

The hardest part I always found about writing Mach macros, was finding out what all the DROs were meant to contain, and I'm sure certain plugins used DROs with no documentation to tell you what DROs were used, let along what they were used for. All it would take was for you to use a DRO that was already being used, and you had the potential for things to wrong.

Thankfully I've never had any problem with probing using Mach3 and a KFlop.

[Ger21]

I suspect the problem with Mach and external motion controllers is to do with how oem/userDROs are allocated and updated.

Not from my experience. It usually has to do with how the plugins work with macros. For instance, most chinese controllers do not support Mach3's GetVAR()function, which is usually used to find the trip point.

Most plugins don't really on any specific DRO's.

DRO conflicts between wizards and screens is a different issue, imo.

[m_c]

You probably are right, regardless I think it's safe to say beneath the surface, it was probably not top of the issue list with Mach 3.

[Neale]

I came across a thread somewhere that had a lot of finger-pointing on the CSMIO/Mach3 compatibility issue. The gist of it seemed to be that because the Mach3 APIs were not particularly well documented, CS Labs worked it out as they went along and ended up using Mach3 functionality that they were not supposed to/should not have used. But it worked. Until Artsoft changed that bit of the code, which is why "updating" to an earlier Mach3 version fixes those particular issues. At the moment, at least, I don't seem to suffer from any of the problems that were presumably fixed in the later Mach3 releases.

I agree that you have to be careful about user DROs, as some screensets use these to transfer values to associated macros. My own very trivial mod to the standard 1024 screenset does exactly that, and I spent quite a long while checking to make sure that it didn't interfere with anything else.

I'm happy with what I have at the moment and it all works fine (apart from lack of support for proper two-motor homing) but I'm not sure that I would go the same way again. I keep looking at the UC300ETH, even though with a decent BOB it would work out to be a similar price to the IP/M. At least it has active support in place!