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There's nothing wrong with a Parallel port controller. My lathe uses a Parallel port. The mill uses both the Parallel port and a Smoothstepper Ethernet controller and the Plasma is USB.
Be careful with the USB controllers - I had endless problems with a cheap one from eBay and eventually bought a UC100 which is spot on. It turned out the eBay one was supplied with a hacked version of Mach3 - and wouldn't work with a 'proper' one. Unfortunately, the 'hacking' rendered bits of it useless, made the behavior unpredictable and the PC crash a lot! You may be more lucky - but for me it was a waste of money!
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By USB control I mean along the lines of the CNC shield for an arduino based system. I don't actually have a parallel port to use and no space for another PCI card! Essentially I'm trying to keep my setup as neat as I can with the two machines being operated on in the same way. Plus this way I get open software such as GRBL so no running the risk of dodgy Mach 3 (which from a lot of the forums seems to be quite prevalent).
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I really like GRBL! I've used it with the Synthetos Shield on a commercial project. The NC Controller needed to be embedded - and it worked perfectly!
Si
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