That might be true, but the main reason is because Mach4 is just not reliable.
I originally thought people hated on Mach4 because of how they treated the deprecation of Mach3, or it was just people being grumpy about having to upgrade. But the more I get better, and the more I talk to other people with Mach4, the more I'm realizing that it's just Mach4. I'm relatively new to CNC in general and make plenty of mistakes. Have lost tool offsets in between operations, resulting in broken end millsįor a long time I thought these were my problems. Have lost work offsets in between tool changes, have lost parts due to it starting in a new location Will occasionally stop homing after one or two axis have been homed, reporting success when the rest of the axis still need homing I've broken several probe tips because the probing routines decided to plunge into the stock _after_ succesfully probing the workpiece And that's not a behavior you want in a CNC machine. but will occasionally do something that totally surprises you. It looks and acts a lot better than Mach 3 in general. The issue with Mach4 is that it's sufficiently flaky/buggy that you can never fully trust it. Meaning you can do CAD/CAM right as the machine runs.
Mach 3 can do great 3D contouring, all of the new softwares will too.įinally, the main advantage to a windows based control is that you can run Fusion on it. I want my machine to run well and run reliable, so I am not averse to spending money on my machine, ultimately it pays for itself in reduced down time, better performance. Though lots are running UCCNC on very cheap PC’s these days too, like $200 mini pc’s. So you can get away with dredging up a piece of junk from the scrap heap for a control. That said, in the right hands LinuxCNC is really capable, and it can be run for cheap because the hardware requirements are basically nil.
And because I make money with my machine I’d rather have real support than have to deal with a community forum. LinuxCNC is great, but I just get tired of dealing with Linux. I pretty much prefer UCCCNC at this point, it’s absolutely better than M3/4. I’ve also used M4, LinuxCNC, and most recently UCCNC. I’ve used M3 very extensively and understand its limitations very well.
It just seems to be a necessity for using the software. TO get M4 really working you are looking at doing some programming in LUA.
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