Mach4 plugin?

[ger21]

Brian Barker just posted that you are working on a Mach4 plugin?
Is this true?
I think that most of your customers would prefer that you use your resources to improve UCCNC.
Wouldn't a Mach4 plugin hurt UCCNC?

[cncdrive]

Hi Gerry,

One of my collegues is working on that for a while now, I'm not.
He is in the finish to release a beta plugin for Mach4 the UC100 soon and if that will mature then it will be only a small step to port it to our other motion controllers.

[cncdrive]

And you know we are not a one person team, we have a few programmers and even the guys who are currently not working as programmers at the company are most of them also programmers.
It is because I'm a programmer and my business partner is also a programmer and most of the people we know and employ we know from the years in the University and also because our city is a "University city" which means that the most universities in Hungary are in our city, there are about 400 new programmers finishes in the city at the University per year.

So, we even have free capacity with programming.
The bottle neck is not the human resource, but it is not possible to work on too many tasks one time regarding one software, because it would create chaos quickly,
so we work in small teams on the different tasks which is much better, the development is then not so fast, but the possibility for bugs is lower, so we prefer this way.

[A_Camera]

Wouldn't a Mach4 plugin hurt UCCNC?

It may hurt the selling of UCCNC but help selling the drivers, so in my opinion it is a good idea. The UC300ETH is a very nice product (as well as the other drivers of CNC Drive) and even using Mach3 feels miles ahead with it compared with using USB and even more so if someone still using parallel port would buy and use it. So I guess it could easily be made very popular with Mach4, even if it was not provided for free. By selling the plugin CNC Drive could get back some or all the losses of UCCNC. After all, who says it must be free? On the other hand, if the plugin would be free it would probably increase the sales of drivers, after all, we must be realistic, not everyone is excited about UCCNC and some prefer Mach4, even if it has some weaknesses.