Mach4+ESS or Acorn?

[kmagyoyo]

The Acorn takes the bulk of intensive calculations on their Acorn controller, Windows is just doing the screen, not the pulsing work.

This is why I chose Acorn. The Acorn processor only has to juggle one ball. Look at your Windows task manager sometime...It's a little scary.

I had a commercially-built router that ran WinCNC, it was very stable and seemed easy to customize. I looked into it for my machine but Acorn ended up being about 1/4 the price.

Acorn's support forum is very good, my first issue (turned out to be Windows related, ha!) had a moderator response within one hour.

[OlfCNC]

This is why I chose Acorn. The Acorn processor only has to juggle one ball. Look at your Windows task manager sometime...It's a little scary.

I had a commercially-built router that ran WinCNC, it was very stable and seemed easy to customize. I looked into it for my machine but Acorn ended up being about 1/4 the price.

The ESS works the same, it does the time critical tasks onboard not Windows. The ESS and many other controllers are also cheaper than the Acorn with more features.

[ger21]

My understanding is that the Acorn does not work the same as the ESS or CNC Drive controllers.
I beleive the Acorn does the trajectory planning in hardware, rather than in software like all the other controllers do.
I may be mistaken, though?

[PCW_MESA]

My understanding is that the Acorn does not work the same as the ESS or CNC Drive controllers.
I beleive the Acorn does the trajectory planning in hardware, rather than in software like all the other controllers do.
I may be mistaken, though?

I don't think so, trajectory planners are complex and need floating point so are likely implemented on the Windows side or perhaps the Beaglebones main CPU
Step generation is probably done by one of the the Beaglebone 2 PRUs. The PRUs (Programmable Realtime Units) are 200 MHz fixed point 32 Bit CPUs
used as real time co-processors for the Beaglebones main ARM CPU.

[samco]

A note.. Linuxcnc's trajectory planner is running in realtime... (which is why things like threading and feedback type stuff works so well)