Announcement: Effective immediately CVI will only provide official MSM support for these qualified Mach3 motion control devices:
Mach3 Parallel port driver
Warp9TD Smoothstepper devices (Ethernet and USB)
By design, MSM will operate with any motion device that correctly and fully implements the actions of the Mach3 parallel port driver. The above devices are known to satisfy this criteria.
Unofficially CVI remains interested in other mach3 motion devices that are available. If a MSM user reports that they have a specific make and model that is trouble free for them, CVI will be willing to pass that info along. However, CVI can no longer accept any obligation to assist in debugging the operation of arbitrary Mach3 motion devices.
OEM's interested in having a motion device tested should contact CVI.
As an FYI for those wondering what has forced us to take this stance, here is the background:
CVI has expended a lot of effort testing mach3 motion control devices in collaboration with MSM customers. We usualy don't mind doing that. Multiple times CVI has analyzed a problem to where the problem has been clearly identified, documented and a test case is developed that can reproduce a problem in the motion device. CVI has then reported the issue to the product vendor and offered to work with them further to test an updated product release. CVI thinks that the motion device vendor should be interested in collaborating to resolve a problem being experienced by one of their customers.
Unfortunately we have encountered vendors that simply don't care about correcting deficiencies in their products. The "better" ones at least honestly tell us that. A worse situation is when we can't find a contact point for the vendor.
You may have noticed that there are several inexpensive Mach Motion Device boards being offered by various Chinese vendors. These run the gambit from cards that are pitched to look as if they are USB connected motion devices (but that only use a USB jack for 5v power) to some 4-6 axis cards that claim to have both a motion engine and BoB functions integrated into the board.
During Q1 2013 CVI has expended a lot of effort attempting to get MSM users running on these boards. In each case we have found it impossible as the boards have significant functional errors when compared to the behavior of the Mach3 Parallel port driver (the "gold" standard for how a Mach3 motion control device should operate). It has proven virtually impossible to contact anyone that could make a change to the board's implementation. The only solution has been for the MSM customer to remove the faulty Chinese motion devices.
The support costs to CVI associated with this situation are excessive, and CVI can not act as a free debugging and errata documentation service for badly implemented motion control devices.
Therefore we have no choice other than to restrict official MSM support to those devices that have proven over time to be both technically excellent and are supported by vendors that have proven to care about product quality (as demonstrated by their customer support and product update history).
The attached paper describes the Mach3 layered CNC control architecture. This is useful for understanding why and how external motion control devices can impact overall mach3 system operation.
