• Scam Alert. Members are reminded to NOT send money to buy anything. Don't buy things remote and have it shipped - go get it yourself, pay in person, and take your equipment with you. Scammers have burned people on this forum. Urgency, secrecy, excuses, selling for friend, newish members, FUD, are RED FLAGS. A video conference call is not adequate assurance. Face to face interactions are required. Please report suspicions to the forum admins. Stay Safe - anyone can get scammed.

Tsugami nm3 ( micro 5 ) CNC lathe C$800 - Chilliwack BC

I settled on UCCNC with their AXBB-E board.
UCCNC & AXBB-E users represent!

I'm a big fan of UCCNC over anything else out there, but it really does feel like development stalled a number of years ago, unfortunately, with development releases every year or so that only contain minor changes and no stable release in 4 years(!). They're apparently working on the turning support which is blocking any other development, but it's been in the works for many years with not even a beta release so far. Although they won't give a timeline for the turning support, it does sound close from some recent posts. I do agree about the documentation too, though there is some great user-generated documentation for certain areas like scripting and macros. I did just notice that the size of the latest version of the manual is double that of the older one I had (16mb vs 8mb previous), so maybe they have been working on that! The other part I really wish was improved was some of the English, as I had to keep notes on what some terms they use actually mean (their CV settings are especially bad for this IMO).
Ultimately, I think UCCNC's biggest issue is the lack of userbase, but that's a chicken and egg thing - they don't seem to have the resources (or perhaps the will/desire, I suspect) to work on it enough to bring it up to par with Mach4, so haven't seen the adoption that would get them past that hump, but they're not seeing that adoption because of its lack of velocity and the outwardly-dead looking state. Other than this post, I can't say I even remember the last time I saw UCCNC come up in discussion anywhere.

Architecturally I think they've got some great things going, I really like the idea of being able to write macros and plugins in C# (or even use their DLL directly from my own C# or native application, and skip UCCNC's interface completely!), and their hardware is nifty. These are the reasons I use UCCNC, but they're not things most people would care about. I do hope they get this turning support sorted and back to more frequent and larger updates, so we see some life breathed into UCCNC soon.
 
works like a charm for those things you might do manually on a mill, such as facing, hole patterns etc. Tormach also provides regulr blog posts with more uses/info/hints: https://blog.tormach.com/ .
To date I've always used my Shumatech DRO for that sort of thing. Finding center. Going from hole to hole. But with the MDI line it's also easy to move to positions, unclamp the quill and center drill all the holes. Then repeat the move to MDI commands by selecting from the history but now drill. Finally the same thing with a center holding the top of the tap handle and applying downward pressure while turning the tap manually.
 
I skimmed through the user manual. Didn't see any of the wizards like MACH has.
The only wizards I've seen are the probing functions. But I had to watch a video five or six times (with absolute crap audio no less) to even begin to understand how it worked. Even then I had to look at the screen like the RCA Victor dog to understand what I was supposed to enter into the various fields.

The silliest documentation bug is that you have to press enter to save a config value. Which is not documented anywhere that I could find. Except there is a setting that allows you to turn off the 'enter to save' function. Except that's not documented either (hugeeyeroll/>
 
No Longer Available -

Tsugami nm3 ( micro 5 ) CNC lathe C$800 - Chilliwack BC​

 
The only wizards I've seen are the probing functions. But I had to watch a video five or six times (with absolute crap audio no less) to even begin to understand how it worked. Even then I had to look at the screen like the RCA Victor dog to understand what I was supposed to enter into the various fields.

The silliest documentation bug is that you have to press enter to save a config value. Which is not documented anywhere that I could find. Except there is a setting that allows you to turn off the 'enter to save' function. Except that's not documented either (hugeeyeroll/>
Actually MACH is like that too. Forget to hit enter and tab out and it reverts back. Most of the software nowadays has a number of different options for TEdit Objects. In this simple example where I've captured part of the screen I can double click on the OnKeyPress field on the left under the events menu for that TEdit object. Since the name of that TEdit object is Edit1 (I haven't renamed it yet) it creates a procedure named Edit1KeyPress.

1662677962582.webp


That double click also takes me to the newly created procedure that looks like this:
Code:
procedure TForm1.Edit1KeyPress(Sender: TObject; var Key: Char);
begin

end;

In that procedure I can test if the Key is equal to a CR, TAB or ESC character and decide what to do with it. Save the value if CR or TAB and restore the original one if it's an ESC.

It's that simple. Most of the IDEs for developing windowing type code have this feature. You can also have it call the OnEnter/OnExit and change the colour of the background or text before you even type anything.
 
Yup! A long time ago....
I did try...
 
Back
Top