Quote Originally Posted by Skip01 View Post
I’m now told that mach3 will work on windows 10 if I get a Pokeys 57CNCd25. Would I need anything else to go with this?
If your talking about building a machine then yes. You will effectively have one piece of thousand piece Jigsaw.!!

Basicly to work any machine needs some form of pulse generator, the parallel port is used by Mach3 Driver to generate and send the pulses through. But the Pulse driver won't work with 64Bit OS so your screwed and can't use mach3 with win10 because it's 64bit only.
So your next choice is to use an external pulse generator (motion control card) which connects to mach3 via USB or Ethernet using a special piece of software called a plug-in which is written exclusively for that particular motion control card so it can talk the same language as mach3. Every motion card as it's own plug-in which is provided by the manufacturer.

Pokeys is just one of many but the ONLY thing it does is generate Pulses and provide I/O (inputs & outputs) path to what ever else is used on the machine, ie Stepper drives, limit switches, relays etc etc so it's just one part of a system, it's a very important part but it's still useless without the many other components that make up a whole working machine.

However all this said, if your looking to buy a machine then all you really need to know is if it uses the parallel port or not. If it does then you cannot use it with Mach3 and win10. If it doesn't then chances are it will be USB or Ethernet and will require the plug-in to go with it.
If you haven't got the plug-in it still won't work with mach3 because they can't speak the same language.!

Hope this makes sense.