Animatics and Mach 3?

[judleroy]

I am trying to setup a system using 4 animatics smart motors. From what I have read they can be setup for step/direction input. The motors are going to be setup on a laptop through 2 USB to serial adapters. Can Mach 3 be setup to send data through a USB serial converter. More importantly can it output through 2 USB ports to different motors at the same time. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Judleroy

[ger21]

Mach3 can only send step/dir signals through the parallel port.
The only way to use USB ports is to use an external motion controller, like the Smoothstepper or KFLOP.

[judleroy]

That kind of what I'm afraid of. The animatics motors have built in motion controllers. As far as I can tell Mach 3 Would just have to send the code. I know Mach 3 works with k-motion and smooth stepper so I'm hoping to be able to integrate it with these motors. What is the issue with using a USB serial adapter? Hope someone can help me work this out so I can use the USB ports but if not I'll go in another direction. Thanks for the input Gerry.
Judleroy

[ger21]

kflop and Smoothstepper use plugins written specifically for them to work with Mach3. Mach3 has no native USB support.