Hi Dan,

The Cubloc modbus card I'm using doesn't have persistent signals. Not that things couldn't have been worked around, I just decided if that's how it'll work, then ok.

I think Mach gets a bad rap from people who go just far enough to get simple functionality, then blame everything that seems odd on Mach. I'm no Mach pro, just persistent. I have no issues with it and have been running it for 8 years. Closest I ever came to laying some oddity onto Mach turned out to be a floating ground adding voltage to various feeds. Got that figured out and been fine every since. But I got away from the old XP system as well as the 32 bit systems. More memory, faster hard drives and a graphic card with it's own memory goes a long ways to solving bottle necks. Then turn all the other crap off and use the pc as a mill control only. Surfing the web and other actions while you're running the mill is just asking for trouble. I don't do anything but have it run the mill. No music, no pictures, no nothing. And no problems.

The big thing for me with the Cubloc was it's size. The modbus stuff I looked at from Automation Direct seemed pretty big in physical size. I wanted to imbed it in my all in one box. So yes, it's standard serial to the pc. I have two ports. I knew I was going to drive the mill via ethernet, so wanted that port free for that. My pc is a smh, so there's no more room to add more cards. I believe the modbus sends the data as bytes in my system. Just the state of the pin is all that was needed.

Bob