In the market for new CNC

[twedlake]

curious about something. And this is for my own edification so keep all the nonsense and off-point stuff to yourself.

I'm finally at a point where I'm wanting to move up to a pseudo-industrial type CNC machine after having owned several "hobbyist-grade" machine since 2016.
Looking at all these machines out there from Shop Sabre, Laguna, Blue Elephant, Langmuir, Industrial, Legacy, Avid, Phantom, Forsun, StyleCNC, etc. and the list just goes on and on...

Why is no one using UCCNC? I see Mach3/4 options and then proprietary options. I've questioned some of these manufacturers and the response is "no sorry, our machines are not compatible with UCCNC"

[cncdrive]

This is because Chinese companies only using Chinese stuff and if must then they using high cost industrial German controllers like Siemens and Omron etc.
They think that the Chinese PC based motion controllers and softwares are as good as UCCNC when they are really not.
Also they not even paying for Mach3, they using a cracked version with a hacked plugin and offering Mach3 software as a free solution for their customers when Mach3 is not free.

And there are companies who using our controllers like Stepcraft, I2R CNC, 5.0Robotics, Rat Rig, CNC4newbie etc.

[CT64]

Why you are seeing allot of Mach 3 is because any Mach 3 (and Mach 4) software supplied from a Chinese CNC company is a 99.99% guarantee illegal copy. Importers buy Chinese machines with hacked "free" Mach 3 then rebrand the machines. Mach software is not free. If you check closely on the machines you listed, you will find the majority of parts are made in China. Most of us on this site probably started out with Mach 3 and found out what a disaster the software is. ArtSoft made numerous attempt to fix the Mach 3 bugs but just created more with every fix until they gave up and stopped support. I wasn't willing to spend $200 to find out if Mach 4 was any better. I changed to UCCNC software and ET400 controller, Gecko stepper driver and never looked back. UCCNC has great customer service.

[Tweakie.CNC]

In basic terms, if you choose a machine that works with Mach3/4 then it will work a whole lot better with UCCNC.

Tweakie.

[twedlake]

This is because Chinese companies only using Chinese stuff and if must then they using high cost industrial German controllers like Siemens and Omron etc.
They think that the Chinese PC based motion controllers and softwares are as good as UCCNC when they are really not.
Also they not even paying for Mach3, they using a cracked version with a hacked plugin and offering Mach3 software as a free solution for their customers when Mach3 is not free.

And there are companies who using our controllers like Stepcraft, I2R CNC, 5.0Robotics, Rat Rig, CNC4newbie etc.

thanks much for the response. I had no idea about the illegal software.

in respect to the machines listed above, I have a cnc4newbie machine for 3 years now and currently running UCCNC 1.2116 and love it. Coming from grbl for nearly 4 years previously, It's taken me 3 years to get acclimated and comfortable enough with UCCNC to now be able to do my own macros, edit screens among other things including being able to troubleshoot machine issues. I just don't find the offerings from those mentioned above to be rigid enough for my upgrade path. Is why I was looking at the chinese offerings like Blue Elephant and Style CNC. I'm making an assumption here that if I buy one of these machines, it can be retrofitted for UCCNC use?

[formantjim]

I agree with Tweakie I used Mach 3 for years and moved to UCCNC and found the performance to be excellent. The Forum here is fantastic with lots of continual support.

In fact I'm refitting a Tree 325 with UCCNC and ETH300 as I'm so comfortable using UCCNC and it offers all the additions natively that is going in to the retrofit. I'm not at your level of writing Macros etc I'm just a casual user but the interface is nice and readable and it just works no fuss.

[Tweakie.CNC]

Both 'Blue Elephant' & 'StyleCNC' are on my listing of Mach3 Pirate Licence providers (I am a moderator on the Artsoft forum) so, as their machines run Mach3 they would run under UCCNC.

Tweakie.

[cncdrive]

To retrofit those machines to UCCNC you will have to replace the Chinse motion controller card with one of ours, in these cases we usually advice the AXBB-E ethernet motion controller and breakout board combo panel, it is easy to rewire most Chinse controllers to the AXBB-E.