I agree. If you have problems with Mach, for whatever reasons, LinuxCNC is a great, low cost, experiment before tossing more money at it.
If you are an experimenter at heart, having BOTH is a good idea. Most of us are not in that position. LinuxCNC seems to scale from big hardware to small desktop (or smaller, or larger depending on your needs). G/M-code support can be done on minimal machines to anything bigger. (There are DOS, RaspberryPi, and arduino implementations of interpreters.) Once you get to desktop size machines or larger it takes to run LinuxCNC or Mach much more can be done in the way of trajectory planning, etc. For the cost for most of our machines, the incremental price of Mach with Windows is real but not 'significant' compared to what it takes for us to build and run our machines. Still, I would rather spend the money elsewhere if possible. I do see WHY some go to Mach. They don't know or trust 'free software'. An irrational fear, but real. So they would rather buy a solution they 'can get support for' rather than having to get involved in a community to know how to obtain real good, fast support. So if they feel their time is better spent by spending money rather than investing in themselves, their education and giving back, it is their choice to make. There are many that do. They vote that way with their pocket book. Full disclosure: Growing up in the computing industry, I started as an anti-M$ geek from Bill Gates 'Open Letter to Hobbyists' days ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists ). That is not a good reason not to use it if M$ based tools are the best for the job, but that is where my attitude / perspective started and has only been supported by M$ adversarial actions toward their customer base ever since. Realistically, I use M$ products, mainly because my wife (and her employer) has a warm and fuzzy about using them, and from the 'if mamma ain't happy, nobody is happy' camp, it isn't worth the battle. Even if non-M$ is a better technical solution, IMHO. -- BTW, I have been using Linux since kernel 0.97, so I have stuck with it for a while. On Sun, Oct 19, 2014 at 2:37 PM, Dave Cole <linuxcncro...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 10/19/2014 3:19 PM, andy pugh wrote: >> On 19 October 2014 01:52, Jack Coats <j...@coats.org> wrote: >>> There is an article in Digital Machinist, Vol 9 No 3, Fall 2014 with the >>> title >>> "Migrating from Mach3 to LinuxCNC" by Thomas Allsup (page 24). >> I wonder why anyone would want to? >> By which I mean, if you have a working, paid for Mach3 installation >> running a machine and making parts, why would you throw it all up in >> the air to change to some different (and approximately equivalent) >> software? > > I would assume that he ran into some issues with Mach3 and decided to > move to LinuxCNC. > It is not difficult to find issues with Mach3 that are hard or > impossibile to resolve. > > I was starting to feel bad for the Mach3 camp, then I saw that there are > two other articles in the magazine that are about Mach3. > > Dave > > > > > > --- > This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus > protection is active. > http://www.avast.com > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Comprehensive Server Monitoring with Site24x7. > Monitor 10 servers for $9/Month. > Get alerted through email, SMS, voice calls or mobile push notifications. > Take corrective actions from your mobile device. > http://p.sf.net/sfu/Zoho > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users -- ><> ... Jack "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart"... Colossians 3:23 "Anyone who has never made a mistake, has never tried anything new." - Albert Einstein "You don't manage people; you manage things. You lead people." - Admiral Grace Hopper, USN "Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." - Ben Franklin ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Comprehensive Server Monitoring with Site24x7. Monitor 10 servers for $9/Month. Get alerted through email, SMS, voice calls or mobile push notifications. Take corrective actions from your mobile device. http://p.sf.net/sfu/Zoho _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
