I am a geek by trade and profession, or was for 25+ years. Now I'm just a regular geek, no longer my profession. I'm a woodworker with a full shop of tools - much better!

But I have rarely been one to jump on and must have the latest, greatest software/hardware/toys, etc. It's fairly normal for me to keep software up to date, at least as it relates to operating systems, but not necessarily apps and production software. I'm still using MS Office 2007! Hey, it works... if it ain't broke don't fix it, right?

So after I cut a couple of Longworth chucks this morning it seemed like a good time to see what versions I was running of Mach4 and ESS. Turned out it's been a while since I moved to newer builds of these two critical pieces for running the CNC.

The Mach4 build was 3804 and I installed it a year ago. It's not even listed on the FTP site now! There have been dozens of builds released since then. Same with the ESS; I installed version 193 in May 2017. That was before I even finished building the CNC - old stuff! LOL!

So I checked the Warp9 website and the newest ESS build version is 253 and they recommend using it with Mach4 build version 4322. There are newer releases but this is the latest Mach4 version that ESS has been paired with for compatibility.

The updates went smoothly except for one minor detail - Go To Zero no longer worked in Mach4. I could force it to work by manipulating some mapping and motor assignments but I really didn't want to do that. So I dug into the Lua programming and modified the code attached to that button and now everything works as it should.

Anyway, it was an interesting exercise and now I have the latest and greatest build versions, or close enough for now.

001 - ESS from May 2017.jpg

002 - Mach4 from Jan 2019.jpg

003 - ESS now current Feb 2020.jpg

004 - Mach4 now current Feb 2020.jpg

David