@Paul_Frederick I have seen a lot of Mach running around this community. Having never used it, I can’t speak to its abilities, but, my imagination believes it is less configurable when compared to LinuxCNC. **I am biased. Free sounds good to me.
@Paul_Frederick Well, he says that it only takes 5 minutes to swap out to printing now that he has done the all the icky stuff.
I consider adding another single board computer (arduino), putting together the communication protocol, and then going in and writing hal files (or loading up some written by others) messing around with it. Not insurmountable but definitely not for the average user.
Not to mention adding support for the non-standard gcodes that 3d printing uses to the interpreter.
@Daniel_Alderman1 two things too look at I think would help you. @Dave_Gatton page on building a wood based Router, with full free plans, and the site I referenced yesterday on using that same CNC with 3D printing.
@David_Kirtley
I don’t know too much about Arduino controllers. The way you say it they sound hard to use to me. I got a plain old PC as my CNC controller.
@Paul_Frederick They are not that bad, but if you have to add an arduino anyway, you might as well control the machine with it as a separate machine.Steppers for it are like $9 on ebay. Why block the cnc router for hours at a time?