Hey John,
Mach3, really? Here Sebastion End tells at this moment of this video he couldn’t use Mach3 because it had too much bugs and failures and was not stable (you can activate english subtitles by selecting Settings → Subtitles → Auto-translated → English. Good that we, the North Germans, speak no dialect, so autotranslating works very well). Also Mach3 runs on Windows and Windows is no realtime operating system. He used Eding CNC and Estlcam which calls “cool” in matters of budget before, but it was controlled over the USB port, so he finally found that only LinuxCNC is reliable enough (comes as an OS image file that has a realtime operating system preinstalled). And if you have a PC and a MESA card (which run on PCI, PCIe slot or on the Ethernet port) and some stepper drivers, you have no costs since linuxcnc.org is Free and Open Software. The MESA cards don’t rely on the computing capacity of the PC processor, but have a programmable FPGA that does the time-critical work for running the stepper motors. As you can program this FPGA, you can even change the MESA card’s capabilities.
The user frontend for LinuxCNC that Sebastian End shows in the video is
QtPyVCP. Nice, eh? Lets the Masso User interface look mingy.