CNC Control Evaluation

[Scott_bob]

What is important that a CNC control do for you?

I'd like some help with creating a list of evaluation questions:

How is the CNC controls Accuracy?
Reliability?
Performance?
Ease of use?
Tool path graphics?

Please help me out guys!

[haseo3de]

That´s simple.
If I asked the machine to make 1 STEP let it do 1 step...
Realtime=Nonsense to me 1 only need 3 axis to do steps after I asked for it.

[pgruendema]

Sometimes a person's goal is little more than making the handles go around. In that case, EMC or TurboCNC both work fine. Some control softwares offer cutter diameter compensation and some don't. Some offer fixture offsets and some don't. Some by their very nature (Turbocnc) don't yet offer continuous motion. Turbocnc must stop and start at the end of every line of the program. On the plus side, Turbocnc is very easy to set up, is very flexible in case you have a non-standard pin arrangement and it allows really fast motion, even with a PII/400 computer. If you can live with the stop/ start motion then Turbocnc should be considered because it is so easy to get it working. EMC is a huge amount of work to get going. It is very buggy and has some default values that make no sense.
PGruendema