There’s also Mach4 Industrial, which has more advanced features than Mach4 Hobby. There are also plugins that are compatible with different CNCs – though there’s no guarantee that Mach4 supports your particular CNC router. But, you can still buy a Mach4 plugin for parallel porting for under $20 and use that to control your CNC. Instead, it relies on external plugins to control the CNC.įor instance, you can’t directly use a parallel port with Mach4 anymore. Like Mach3, Mach4 also calculates the movements inside your CPU, but the focus is not on the parallel port anymore. Therefore, Newfangled Solutions sells Mach4 separately, and doesn’t allow upgrades from Mach3 to Mach4. Also, Mach3 scripts and screen sets are not compatible with Mach4 (we’ll explain these fully later). So, think of them as separate software.Īs a result, plugins that work with Mach3 are not compatible with Mach4, and vice versa. Instead, Mach4 is a new software that shares less than 1% of its code with Mach3. However, this is not true – Mach4 is not an update on Mach, even though it is more advanced. Some think that Mach4 is the updated or more advanced version of Mach3. As a result, Mach4 has plugins to make it compatible with several controllers, and it can also work without a controller by parallel porting. Mach4 is another offering from the same company, but is different from most CNC software since it focuses on becoming a 3rd party software for CNCs. So, although Mach3 doesn’t need an external controller, it still needs an external board even though the g code processing happens in the computer’s CPU. For these reasons, you need an external board to isolate the computer, work with USB or ethernet instead of the parallel port, and provide enough pins for wiring. Plus, the parallel port has limited pins – and doesn’t even exist on modern computers anymore. However, wiring stepper motors directly to the parallel port is dangerous. On the hardware side, Mach3’s old approach to eliminating an external CNC controller was to replace it with your computer using its parallel port. However, there are things to consider when using Mach3. Therefore, Mach3 allows DIYers to control their CNCs without an industrial controller. It’s unique because it doesn’t require an external motion controller, although Mach3 plugins can also make it compatible with several external motion controllers. Mach3 is a CNC control software for Windows. We have also written an article on GRBL vs Mach3. This way, you don’t have to rely on Mach3 or Mach4 for CNC control. They can act as 3rd party software for some external controllers, or they can work even without a controller, and turn your computer into a CNC controller.īut you have to be very careful choosing beteween Mach3 or Mach4 – they’re more different than you might think.Īlternatively, you could buy or build a simple CNC controller like GRBL or a full-blown industrial CNC controller. But strangely, you can have it the other way around: with Mach3 and Mach4, you get CNC software without a matching controller. You can’t have a CNC controller without its own software. Mach3 can control 6 stepper motors, while Mach4 can control up to 30 stepper motors.īetter scripting language and more features.Mach4 has more features for advanced users, including macro-B and PLC programming.Mach4 has a simulation plugin, Mach3 doesn’t.Mach4 has a better UI with convenient screens for g code editing and probing.They cost about the same: Mach3 costs $175, Mach4 costs $200.Their plugins are not interchangeable and do not work with each other. Mach4 is not just a Mach3 update – it’s a completely different software sharing less than 1% of the same code.
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