Opinions of Mach3 Turn

[Tony JeffreeParticipant @tonyjeffree56510]

Posted by Tony Jeffree on 26/09/2023 10:17:25:

Posted by John Haine on 25/09/2023 18:19:46:

The second seems to be just an ELS at the moment though implied it may be upgraded to full cnc.

There is a bit more detail here:

https://github.com/kachurovskiy/nanoels/blob/main/h4/README.md

Does indeed look as if G-code support is a work in progress. One attraction to me is that it supports a shaft encoder, rather than a single pulse-per-rev encoder, so the threading support shouldn't suffer the problems that can occur with 1PPR encoders. I bought one of the early John Dammeyer ELS kits and this aspect of its operation wasn't good.

The fact that it doesn't need a PC for the more straightforward operations is a plus too. At the price I'm tempted to give it a go.

[NealebParticipant @nealeb]

I decided in the end to go with the PlanetCNC option. No, it does not have the CSS feature (at least, not yet) but I think it does have feed per rev, and supports a shaft encoder for speed control and threading. I might have been swayed by the LinuxCNC/Mesa option and accepted the work involved in setting it all up, but the desirable Mesa cards seem unavailable (according to the Mesa web site) and I'm not that happy with the idea of continuing use of tthe parallel port. I'm now collecting all the bits I need to get installing sometime soon.

The ELS+extras solution seems less desirable for a from-the-ground-up CNC lathe as opposed to upgrading from a manual machine which is a different story. In fact, I have been thinking for a long time about an ELS addition to my Smart and Brown to allow easy imperial threading on a metric machine, and to simplify metric threading as well (nice-to-use threading gearbox but stil have to change the TDI gear for some pitches).

[Tony JeffreeParticipant @tonyjeffree56510]

Posted by Nealeb on 28/09/2023 14:58:29:

I decided in the end to go with the PlanetCNC option. No, it does not have the CSS feature (at least, not yet) but I think it does have feed per rev, and supports a shaft encoder for speed control and threading. I might have been swayed by the LinuxCNC/Mesa option and accepted the work involved in setting it all up, but the desirable Mesa cards seem unavailable (according to the Mesa web site) and I'm not that happy with the idea of continuing use of tthe parallel port. I'm now collecting all the bits I need to get installing sometime soon.

The ELS+extras solution seems less desirable for a from-the-ground-up CNC lathe as opposed to upgrading from a manual machine which is a different story. In fact, I have been thinking for a long time about an ELS addition to my Smart and Brown to allow easy imperial threading on a metric machine, and to simplify metric threading as well (nice-to-use threading gearbox but stil have to change the TDI gear for some pitches).

I would agree – if you are planning on going full fat CNC then the PlanetCNC option looks very attractive. In my case, an easy to use ELS that provides the basic functions (threading, facing, turning, tapers, ball turning…) is pretty much all I need.

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