I've been taking a closer look at these cards (well, actually the ET6) as I continue to get annoyed by silly little things with my Mach3/CSMIO-IP/M/wireless pendant setup. One thing that concerned me and which is a bit of a pain with the IP/M is gantry squaring. Looking at their web site and a downloaded copy of the MyCNC software, it looked as if this would work OK but I couldn't see if it could handle software gantry squaring adjustment or would need mechanical alignment of the home switches. Couldn't find anything in the documentation, searching for words like master/slave axes, so asked them the question. Then I had a prowl around their support forum to see if anyone had asked before, and by following an odd link in a slightly relevant post, I found that the documentation does include some info on gantry squaring. Pages and pages of it, including blow-by-blow descriptions of the associated macros, and even a video clip (11 minutes of it!) showing a couple of different methods of doing it. It does everything I would want it to do, and then some. And I have never, ever, seen quite so much detail provided in a manual. So apart from the fact that it is incredibly well-hidden, it's great!

At the moment, every time I start up my machine, I have to go into the CSMIO config page, disable axis slaving, run a custom homing macro that allows for gantry squaring, back into CSMIO config and re-enable slaving, then I have to jog each of the three axes off the home position with the pendant (not Mach3, not by running any gcode) or I get limit switch messages as soon as I move anything. Then there's the random soft limit errors, sometimes before a job will run, sometimes after a tool change. Suddenly, $400 for a board plus management software that is electrically compatible with what I have doesn't seem like such a bad deal...