I am in the early stages of selecting a CNC setup. I'm nowhere near deciding whether or not I want to go with a Chinese setup, one of the various CNC builds available from Canada, or one of the relatively high dollar setups made in the US. One thing I need clarity on is the controller software.
My neighbor has built and operated several CNC setups from scratch, and is pretty advanced in terms of his programming skills; one of his side jobs is designing Android based chemical injection systems for commercial irrigation. He is pretty opinionated and he insists that I stay far away from anything using GRBL and that I should only consider Mach3 based systems. As far as CAD systems are concerned, he used several different systems, using Libre for quite a while, but now uses VCarve.
I've been messing around with computers since 1983, mostly PC based but some Android. My initial exposure to CAD was AutoCad 10 back in the late 80s or early 90s. I was a high school shop teacher before I retired and have a passing familiarity with CAD, 3D printing, CNC routing, plasma cutting and CNC laser work, although to be honest most of my teaching experience was conventional shop; I generally let the CAD teachers handle all the digital stuff. However, I did get a nasty old plasma cutting system up and working at my last school, and I have done a little messing around with Rhino.
The only obvious problem I can see with Mach3 is that it's parallel port based, but that's no big deal as refurbrished PCs with parallel ports are readily available as are ad-in cards for PCs. My neighbor says Mach3 is much more capable and less fussy than GRBL, although from what I have been able to discover on line, Mach3 often seems to take quite a bit of fooling around to get it to work right. Nearly all of the turnkey CNC systems use GRBL based control software, although some of the much smaller Chinese systems have Mach3 controllers available, but those are generally in the 3018 size range which is a lot smaller than what I want to do.
Any information would be appreciated.