Smooth Steppers are finally available in UK !

[boldford]

As a newby I'm just getting to grips with this whole CNC thing.
I think readers here fall into two broad camps. There are those with an IT exposure that want to get into carving real materials and those that manipulate material manually and want to bring in the benefits of NC.

From what I've read to date and my general experience of other M$ based PC S/W I am of the perception that Mach is a slick application which works straight out of the box for most people. Understandably, Art brought success to his application by designing it to run on the World's most popular OS. Unfortunately the M$ OS being closed source means he's pretty much stuck with it, as is, warts and all. Modern PCs are so fast that they can usually mask the inherent non-real time weaknesses of the OS. I'm sure SS is capable of overcoming those timing weaknesses - at the price ($$$ or £££) of throwing more processing power at the job.

On the other hand LinuxCNC sets out to be more flexible, and certainly more precise in the timing domain even with low end processors (P4 or earlier), but to me it seems to be less than friendly to the non-IT geek by failing to be as easy to set up as it could be after the great promise shown during install from an ISO CD. For LinuxCNC to become more popular I would appeal to those within the LinuxCNC fraternity to consider my comments if they intend to port it to 12.04LTS along with a substantial re-write of the manual.

That's just my two-penny-worth; but what do I know?

[JAZZCNC]

As I mentioned earlier in the thread, just because something is more popular doesn't necessarily mean it is the best. Plus, although it is clear that Mach3 is the most popular in England, I don't think you'll find that's the case in some countries.

Yes and I don't disagree in some respects and certainly wasn't saying Mach3 was better than linux cnc.!! Each has it's own set of skills and weakness's.!!. . BUT we do live in UK and tend to work within the English speaking domains like Cnczone etc so this does become important.! Very important to some people who haven't got IT skills and don't want to learn Geek.!!
They need good sources of information and help from friendly more experienced users, I know the result of such a poll. . . But it will show to others just how wide the user base for each software really is.!! . . . This can then be used has a guide to help them decide if this holds any value to them.?

[bobc]

I use Windows and Linux, I have no philosophical preference. I try to use whatever application has the best price/performance/ease of use, sometimes that means running on Windows sometimes Linux. Perhaps easier for me having multiple boxes, if you have a single box and need to choose that makes it more difficult.

I am sure there is no "right answer" here, it depends on your budget of both time and money, but logically try linuxCNC first because it is free, and then try Mach.

[bobc]

In a desperate attempt to steer the thread back on topic, does any here use Smoothstepper board, and if so what do they think of them?

On a technical note, the Smoothstepper board appears to use a Xilinx FPGA to do the crunching, and I guess an FTDI USB chip, is that right?

[Ger21]

I don't use one, but there are a tremendous amount of Smoothstepper users at CNC Zone. And most everyone who uses seems to love it.
Yes, I believe it's an FTDI USB chip, as the FTDI driver is on the Smoothstepper site.

The general consensus seems to be that the ethernet SS is the only way to go these days. The USB version has always suffered from noise issues. Some have no problems with it, but a lot of people do. The ESS is said to be pretty much immune to noise.

[bobc]

Thanks, that is interesting. We tried to put in USB to one of our products at work (a motor drive for a vacuum pump), and it failed as soon as the motor started! With improved filtering we can get past that, but we still have trouble with EMC tests. The problem is that the USB falls over, and doesn't recover, which for industrial control is not acceptable.

I think in low noise/office type environments USB is fine, when you get too near heavy kit it is just not up to the job. People's experience seems to match what we have found.

Ethernet does seem like a much better alternative, it's cheap, robust and widely supported.

[Ger21]

The problem is that the USB falls over, and doesn't recover

That sounds just like what happens. When the Smoothstepper lost the connection, it required Mach3 to be closed and restarted to re-establish the connection.

[Jonathan]

99.9% of issues with Windows "interrupting" Mach3 are power saving features

No, the majority of processor time not devoted to mach3 goes towards keeping the other >30 processes (mostly unnecessary) and many other threads ticking over with background processes. This is obvious. 99.9% is a completely fabricated figure which doesn't reflect reality at all. Additionally just look at the idle CPU useage for a windows machine and then for a Linux machine: even when doing nothing on a high end machine, windows will struggle to flatline at 0, while linux won't.

but there are no timing errors as you claim.

There are always​ timing errors, both on Linux and on Windows, the difference being they're lower on Linux. Here's another post on the subject that isn't mine:

EMC does run in a realtime kernal so all its I/O is realtime. Mach runs in a Buffered system, once the buffer runs there is little to no interaction to the pulse stream.

Mach3 will automatically set your steps/unit without entering anything but a measured distance.

I've been over this recently. This introduces a systematic error which limits the accuracy of the machine to the accuracy of what you used to measure that distance. That wizard is best used for something else entirely.

From Windows 2K on, Windows is extremely stable

Windows ME was released after windows 2k, and is very widely accepted to be exceptionally unstable, therefore your statement is wrong.

I haven't seen Windows crash in well over 10 years.

Either you don't use windows very often, or you are extremely lucky. Anyway, apparently you are under the impression that stability equates to lack of crashing. I regret to inform you that this isn't the case. Linux is simpler, lighter, and bugs get fixed a lot quicker. It stands to reason that it's more stable. If Ubuntu does appear to crash whilst running the machine, then due to the real time kernel the machine will more than likely continue running and thus not loose position.

Mach3 runs on Vista and Windows 7 as well as 2K and XP

Fair enough, perhaps I should have said "runs optimally" - Vista and 7 are both considerably heavier than XP (Vista is an absolute joke anyway).

MAch3 can do helical arcs and threadmilling too.

My apologies, Mach can do helical arcs (and therefore threadmilling without interpolating), I was misinformed.

I have not said that Mach wont work, or will definitely introduce errors, it's just inherently more likely to than LinuxCNC, hence I advise trying both.

[Ger21]

Double post

[m_c]

I've got a USB SS, however it's on a Connect lathe and is hardly pushed.

I've not had any issues with the USB dropping out, however some people do and struggle to fix it.