I wonder if I could tap the collective wisdom here on how I should migrate from Mach 3 please? I've been using M3 for about 8 years now generally successfully, using an old Dell Optiplex computer running XP and driving through the parallel port. I have 3 worries: the machine is old and might crash any time and XP computers with PP are rare and also old; I've written quite a few macros and a new turning offset screen but that isn't finished yet, so there will be some legacy pain; Mach 3 documentation is DIRE and the software seems to be a patch kluge. As I'm about to upgrade my old Win 7 laptop to a new Win10 one I have an option to dedicated the old machine to CNC. So I'm thinking about both software and hardware options and very interested in others' experiences.

My options seem to be
1 Switch to a motion controller – this seems to be a given – preferably one that has a parallel port output so it can just plug in to my BoBs on lathe and mill. UC100 looks interesting.

and…

2 Mach 3 - but pretty unsupported now and poorly documented and will motion controller plugin support continue? Might be a way in though.

3 Mach 4 – but why did they choose Lua as a scripting language rather than for example Python? Is the user base big enough for it to survive?

4 UCCNC

5 PlanetCNC

6 Linux CNC – not sure if this supports motion controllers and anyway has a reputation for difficulty in setting up

7 A dedicated controller – but that may not give me the flexibility I need for example to run my offset setting scripts.


Any war stories or advice from others who have travelled this route would be most welcome!

T.I.A.

John.