new to cnc

Well you must know what kind of answer you will get to that question on the EMC forum...

EMC is the most cost effective software for CNC you can find and is the most advanced.

If you "have" to keep windows and have money to waste and don't want to thread or rigid tap or use servos and are scared of Ubuntu and want to pay for custom screens and the list goes on... you might want Mack.

I've been there done that... for a few minutes and came running back here.

Assuming you have steppers and want to use software step generation then download the LiveCD and boot up your computer on it and do a latency test... and no, laptops won't work with CNC.

John

tjfisher wrote:

can someone give me a kinda pros and cons so i can stop tossing this back and forth
ill host pic's when i get some time

I will try to be unbiased, but the very fact that I am so deeply involved in the EMC2 project is a clue as to what my opinion is.

The difference is a bit like the difference between Windows and Linux themselves. Mach3 is probably easier to set up, and if it does what you want out-of-the box is a good choice. EMC2 has the stepconf wizard which makes initial setup straightforward, but if you want to get under the skin to configure unusual things then it rapidly gets fairly complex.

However, you _can_ get at the underlying layers, and this makes EMC2 a lot more flexible. You have complete control over where the inputs and outputs get routed, and you can fiddle with them and combine them in any way you want inside HAL. The drawback is that HAL is fairly daunting when you first start with it. (Many users never need to or want to, though, and just work with the Wizards)

On an even deeper level, if you want to add a feature to EMC2, or don't like the way something is done, you can change it. Or you can persuade somebody else to change it for you if programming isn't your thing. The whole source code is there to be seen and modified.

EMC2 supports a wider range of hardware, but it does not support any USB hardware (with the exception of manual input devices like gamepads, keyboards, jogwheels etc). Mach3 plays well with USB devices like Smoothstepper.
However the range of PCI, ISA and Parallel port hardware supported is large:
wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emcinfo.pl?EMC2_Supported_Hardware
It is not all that difficult to add support for other hardware too, the interfaces are all open, and there are tools to simplify the process. There are a couple of cards that I have written drivers for without ever seeing them.

If you want to run closed-loop servo control (not step-control open-loop servo) then EMC2 is the only choice (between the two options under consideration). Similarly if you want to run an unusual kinematics (robot arm, tetrapod etc).
I don't know how good the Mach3 support for Lathes is, it used to be a bit flaky but might well have improved.

There is a lot of user support for Mach3. Probably more than for EMC2. I can make no comment on the quality of that support.