I have been running techno machines for about 18 years now, I also have recently rebuilt an old motion master that I have running with fanuc ac servos granite devices drives, and mach3 with a smooth stepper.
While quite different, and performance over the years has changed quite a bit, I still am running my technos. I started with a stepper setup and switched to servo as soon as they had it working with reasonable continuous motion. I cut 3 dimensional wood parts, so smooth motion through 3d interpolations ( short segment code) is important to me. I just switched to 420Q on the soft ware for the techno, I am getting the best results ever with the new motion, advance smoothing and the new prepossessors and drivers. it used to be that even at lower cutting speeds, there would be a ripple effect showing in the surfaces, caused I presume by jerk. the new motion is no longer showing signs of jerk. I was able to get amazing results on surfaces while running at 4000 mm/min
mach 3 is currently a very good interface, it works very well for many things, at present, from my experience, small segment code in 3d linear interpolations is not one of them. 2d and 2 1/2 d work is good. using tempest planner and having code where almost all moves are tangential, you can get motion which is exceptionally good. I really like mach 3, if all I needed to do was flat work, I would stick with it but I need good fast smooth 4 axis motion so I just ordered a techno pci 400 card to run my big machine. To clarify, it does not seem to loose accuracy, it is just much slower in this type of cutting.
By the way, on my earlier post about the pin outs for the start stop switch, it turns out that it is no longer required with XP. I guess I should stay up to date.
I say all this to say, make sure that if you jump to a new interface that it will fit with all you need it to do.  |