Calypso CNC User Forums

Hello,

ESS recommends Mach3 v3.043.062
MSM say Mach3 v3.043.066 because of some lags in .062 (which I tried and have it also)

My machine have master/slave steppers (and homing limit switches for master/slave) for Y and Z axis, so the homing procedure have to work without issues.

Any experiences to share regarding this type of configuration?
As I said, I tried W7/x64 with Mach3 v3.043.062, MSM v2.0.12 and ESS with last plugin version. All OK excepting some lag in scripts.

I will try to "fix" the lag issue with v.066 of Mach3 but - in the mean time - any advice is welcome

Thanks,
Seb

Hi,
Here is the history of mach version 62 and 66 -

Once upon a time mach versions were released on an irregular schedule. Unfortunately Artsoft was never good at publishing release notes for each release. That made it hard to know what had changed between releases. In those days I was doing active development of MSM and was up to speed with each release of mach3. The MSM release notes are full of bug reported to Artsoft and whihc version of mach3 they were verified against. MOst of those were never fixed by Artsoft.

To make matters even harder, each mach 3 release tended to fix some things, maybe add a new feature and to frequently broke something that used to work. Quality control was never a strong point for mach3 development. Much of MSM's popularity is that it has internal code to work around many known mach3 bugs. To make things really confusing, Art soft had a (IMHO) bad habit of releasing multiple different mach exe files which all reported themselves as the same mach version number. Thus, you don't always know that the version of mach that you are running is actually the same as the one a friend is running - even though they both report the same version numbers. This point will be come up again a little bit later in this post...

When MSM was written, I was working closely with Artsoft and they implemented several key features at my request. The MSM implementation utilizes several of those features.

Back in those days (last 1/2 of 2012), the latest, stable version of Mach which had all the features MSM depended on was 3.43.66. That is the version CVI recommends for use with MSM. Not all o the expected features are in mach version 62. 3.43.66 is still the MSM recommended version if you are running XP, Win 7, or 8. As of last 2012, 66 was current, stable with MSM and easily available.

Then time passed and Microsoft released WIN 10. When WIN 10 was first released, mach3 was fine on the first few W10 releases. Then Microsoft tightened up security and a side effect was that the mach3 (perhaps due to the parallel port driver) would no longer load under WIN 10. The symptom is that mach3 will hang forever when loading under newer versions of win 10. That caused lots of complaints to Artsoft - users wanted a fix for this problem. However, Artsoft (USA) was then pushing Mach 4 and instead they have quit all support for Mach3. They essentially told Mach 3 users, "tough, buy mach 4 instead".

There was a third party (I have forgotten the company name) who didn't like the situation, so they figured out what the problem was between Mach3 and Win 10. They fixed it by patching the mach3.exe version 3.43.62 binary file. I'm guessing that was all they could do since Artsoft would not let anyone look at the sources for mach3 - preventing a proper fix to mach3 for the problem. Why did that company fix 62 and not 66 or 67 or any other version? I suspect because 62 was the version they liked and ran internally. They did what they needed form themselves and then their mach3 vs win 10 problem was solved.

After a while Artsoft got tired of customers still complaining about mach3 not running on win 10. an arrangement was made where the third party company gave the binary patched 62 file to Artsoft and Artsoft published it on their web site for download. Artsoft also started saying that the only recommended Mach3 version for win 10 was this patched 62.

NOTE: this means that the 62 version you get from Artsoft today IS NOT THE SAME as the 62 version released in 2012. Further, AFAIK there is no source code which corresponds to the 62 binary available today from Artsoft. Over the year this has lead people to believe that 3.43.62 (binary patched version) is the only recommended mach3 version.

Alas, there are significant features and bug fixes 3.43.66 which do not exist in any of the flavors of 3.43,62. A key example for MSM is that the feature used to support all the single/double probe signal handling was not yet implemented in 3.43.62 (2012 release). I pointed all this out to Artsoft when they posted the binary patched 62 version. They told me they did not care. I believe they did not know what the binary patch was in the modified 62 file and so could not apply it to other released mach3 versions. IMHO Artsoft was not (and still is not) interested in fixing any Mach3 user issues. They simply wanted to minimize the user complaints from Mach3 with Win 10.

So, if you don't run Win 10, there is no reason to run the binary patched version of 3.43.62 (unless that is a version with some particular advantage for your specific uses of mach 3). Run XP, 7 or 8 instead. This get harder and harder to do as other programs (Like almost all browsers) drop support for anything other than win 10. For example, you won't get a current release of most browsers to run on XP.

If you have to run a current version of win 10 for your mach3 cnc control, then you are stuck with the binary patched version of 3.43.62 for mach 3.

Dave

Wow, thank you for such a complete explanation.
But I still have one more question, if somehow you know the answer:
ESS will have homing issues under .066? This is what I am afraid for. And probing/measuring, too.

I just installed a new combination of W7x64, Mach3 .066, last plugin of ESS and my MSM 2.0.12.
It seems to run better and for now I did not found any issues. But I did not tested it very much yet. Any chances to got into trouble later?

And a different question: do you intend to make MSM available for Mach4 or UCCNC?

Thanks, Seb

Hi,

sebba wrote:Wow, thank you for such a complete explanation.
But I still have one more question, if somehow you know the answer:
ESS will have homing issues under .066? This is what I am afraid for. And probing/measuring, too.

I just installed a new combination of W7x64, Mach3 .066, last plugin of ESS and my MSM 2.0.12.
It seems to run better and for now I did not found any issues. But I did not tested it very much yet. Any chances to got into trouble later?

I don't know of any problems to expect. Mach 3 66 and MSM are stable components. The ESS firmware changes occasionally but I don't think it has changed a a lot recently for Mach3 use.
There is no way to know with 100% certainty ahead of time. Each user designed and built system is different (electrical design, grounding aspects etc) so it comes down to you have to give it a try. [/quote]

sebba wrote: And a different question: do you intend to make MSM available for Mach4 or UCCNC?

Thanks, Seb

We have no plans to reproduce MSM for UCCNC or mach 4.

Dave

Thanks, so far so good, one more day, all good.
I still have some issues (lag) regarding modbus cfgs (maybe to many) but this is another story.
It seems .066 it's working good with MSM and ESS under W7/x64. No homing issues, no probing/measuring issues.

Best regards