I'm with you on this Neil. My spreadsheet currently shows it's going to cost in the region of £3200 although I think there are some savings to be made on materials. A £40 (maybe £80) saving would be nice and I'm thankful for the suggestion but at the same time I have to weigh that up against the fact I'm very time poor and spending a little extra to walk a well trodden path feels like a reasonable investment.

It's basically the same reason I've chosen to go the Mach3/ESS route. I'm sure I could get LinuxCNC to work with a cheap BOB but the days of me being able to spend 40 hours a week in the shop are, sadly, a distant memory. I'm also interested in trying to write applications to directly control the machine and doing that via the ESS looks like it would be significantly easier than trying to do it through the parallel port and dealing with the exacting timing issues (this could be very naive of me though).

Neil, would you'd be interested in a combined purchase of the AM882's Jonathan linked to?