Smooth Steppers are finally available in UK !

[Jonathan]

So you know this from your extensive usage of the SS.?

As you would say:

Presumption is the mother of all F:U.!! . . . SO NOW. . How the F~@K do you know what I've done or not done with my machine.? Or any other machine for that matter.:exclaim: . . . . . reading a few old post's don't make you Physic Sally.

I know this from some research and my common sense. I don't need to have climbed Mt. Everest to know it's really really cold, because that's obvious.

Jonathan this kind of disrespect really annoys me.!!!

I don't see how I've said anything disrespectful. If Art didn't care about money he wouldn't be charging for it. There's nothing wrong with charging for your work, I never said there was.

Price is relative. Something can only be expensive in the context of something else. Compared to it's nearest competitor, Mach3 is expensive and does fewer things.

without Mach or Art fennerty's contribution then DIY CNC would still be in the stone age or not exist at all

I wouldn't be so sure. Clearly Art has done a great job, but who are we to say someone else wouldn't have done it if he had not?

Little Known is the fact Emc owe's much to Art and his knowledge of the PP and indeed use's some of his code.

They fundamentally have very different architectures so I think that's highly unlikely, could you please provide a reference?

Anyway instead of calling me names perhaps you'd like to point out what I've said that's not true? I never said Art did anything wrong, you're putting words in my mouth. I simply said they have little incentive to improve. If they choose to improve regardless out of the kindness then kudos to them.

Being tight is the only way I can even hope to own a workshop before my 30th birthday. Between being tight and not having a workshop... well I know which one I'm picking.

Could you please not accuse me of things I've not done? I happily admit to being a geek (at least I'm not in denial), but I have most certainly not 'trashed' anyones 'rep'. I would prefer it if you picked fault with what I said instead of who or what I am.

There has been a recent thread over on the Yahoo forum DIY-CNC where a guy called Dan Maulch, well respected builder of CNC systems has been having problems getting a Gecko 540 to work with Linuxcnc. Also on the same forum of two of the Linuxcnc development team who also can't get this thing to work right.

There will always be people having problems - I can list lots of people struggling with Mach3 (with or without smooth-stepper), just because he's having problems and he has a reputation, that's not to say LnuxCNC is bad, at all. You can't use a small number of isolated examples to try to discredit an entire program - the reason people can't help him is likely a hardware rather than a software problem

Another point brought up is why if it's so good and successful it looks like a basic experiment as regards the screens.Our Mach screens have everything, MDI, tool offsets, probe, 4th axis etc and large buttons for touch screens all on one screen, users do not need to move away from this screen.
You can easily zero any axis and jog away if you break a tool, change it and reset offsets and do a run from here.

Don't like our screens?, use someone elses or alter your own.

I don't know how long its been since you've tried linuxCNC, but it has MDI and 4th axis as standard. There's other 'screens' available, the screen for LinuxCNC is fully customisable ... so anyone can make the buttons large if they wish. Linuxcnc has all the functionality you mentioned. Bear in mind, there is a huge library of user contributed content for LinuxCNC and it supports a much wider variety of machines.