Any alternatives to Mach4?

Hello avid forum.
What are some alternatives to Mach control? We have to baby sit this machine so it doesn’t completely ruin customer parts. Honestly we have lost trust in the tool. Around 3/10 jobs mach will crash the torch or sometimes inexplicably lose soft limits or something strange. Seems to be 99% a Mach problem. My employees, two of which are very experienced with various plasma/mill/laser/waterjet CNCs, say Mach 4 isnt up to par compared to what they are used to.
I don’t have enough experience to make that determination however what I read about mach elsewhere backs up what they claim.

Saw this company mentioned elsewhere as an alternate.
https://pumotix.com/
Seems to be pretty robust, even has breakout boards, post processors for sheet cam, etc.

Any known, reliable options?
I understand this would require harware changes as well but I want to explore all options before shelving the avid and going with a new, albeit more expensive, turnkey plasma CNC.
Thanks!

My Avid is run by LinuxCNC… https://www.linuxcnc.org/
I don’t know if linuxcnc is compatible with the controller the default Avid electronics use, but upgrading just the core board (I use a Mesa 7i76E) is still cost effective.
https://www.delorie.com/photos/cnc2/

Why not Centroid? Avid is moving to Centroid so you got support there.
I looked at 3 systems…Centroid, Uccnc and linuxcnc.
for plasma … https://myplasmcnc.com.pl seems a good product.

I email all 4 companies and all of them were incredible responsive (linuxcnc forum is good too.)
Almost went with Uccnc (Uccnc does not have an easy way to resume failed cuts like Centroid and myplasm) but when Avid announced they are moving to Centroid it was a no brainer…I should be running Centroid in 3 weeks :smiley:

Centroid has everything I need…probing is very important to me.
plasma resume on a failed cut is a big one also.

I installed linuxcnc on an old pc just to check it out…Uccnc as well.
but in the end I want a turnkey system…I have a shop to take care of so I need the machine to run…not every night reading and trying to figure stuff out.

One thing I forgot is going from Vcarve to cutting…skipping to go thru sheetcam is also time saved .

1 Like

I’ll let this video (that I made!) answer most of those questions: https://youtu.be/ISYsK76DtwI

Suffice it to say when we first started investigating new controls we tested plasma first. Plasma is really hard to get right given that there’s so much electrical noise going in when you’re doing it.

As you probably gleaned from the video Centroid rocks at plasma. They separate the torch sensing/control away from the main control via fiber optics which is a MASSIVE improvement over any other system in this price class.

I can tell you from personal experience here at Avid that our plasma systems are now becoming something so reliable and fun to use that we have remote employees driving in hours to come in and use our machine at HQ because it works reliably every time.

If I were you and looking for an upgrade that’s rock solid reliable this is what you’re looking for. It’s plug and play with what you have, so the swap can be done very fast.

Let me know if you have any more questions, happy to help.

1 Like

Just looked on the site, $4500 is a big pill to swallow for upgrading a machine that never functioned as it was supposed to. What is the bare minimum I would need to change?

Also for those of us here with the current system, does this mean AVID will no longer support it if not upgrading?

We still support Mach systems we just don’t sell them. If you need some help getting your current setup more reliable please contact support. We will help you.

Your cost of upgrade will be a lot less than that stated price. You won’t need motors or new cabling, and we are taking old controllers in on trade and offering a credit.

I don’t know what the exact cost will be for you but it could potentially be half. Have support give you a quote.


Big Acorn Fan Easy to install and set up and reliability has been Great

2 Likes