Quote Originally Posted by Doddy View Post
Just a slight cautionary note - as I have the 5-axis version of the above controller. Note, it's a 200kHz controller - the effect of this is the output pulses are active for 2.5us (I measured) and this can cause problems with cheaper stepper drivers (in my case, the opto-isolator response rate). The rather limited driver doesn't provide any mechanism to change the pulse width and doesn't honour the Mach3 settings. So, if you have one of these controllers, and you lose steps (in my case it was visually evident in operation) then look at the stepper driver response rate. DO NOT google for a pulse-extender, at least not on your company's IT system(!) Been there...

Didn't Mach3 get updated for Win10/64 bit? Either way, Win10 and auto-updates pee me off enough to stick with 7 for my controlling PC (running UCCNC/SX2.7, I still have XP on my Mach3/StarMill PC).
Most Leadshine drives require 5uS pulses. Not sure about the latest ones, but certainly the EM and standard ones did.


Mach3 will run on pretty much any modern version of windows, it's the parallel port driver that won't work on anything 64bit, or anything newer than Win7 (Win7 32bit is the last version the PP driver will work on). The reason is Microsoft switched to an encrypted kernel at that point, and as the PP driver relies on controlling the kernel, it wouldn't work without a lot of hacking. IIRC Art did manage to do some basic testing, but discovered the encryption regularly changes, so it just wasn't feasible.


Personally, if all you need is a single parallel port interface, I'd go for a UC100. It's not ethernet, but it's probably the simplest option with good support.