Laser engraver/cutter from old 3D printer.

[tonyfoale]

Yes, I know and like the ESP32, I have a drawer with different flavors of ESP32 and the older 8266.
But surprisingly, it turns out I didn't used it a lot so far in practical projects, it's often overkill and it lacks i/os.

Overkill at times I agree but I use the 38 pin versions and even on my lathe project I had enough I/O. Only one spare but enough.

I will have to show also my CNC pendant, based on micro, which sends key stocks to Mach3 or SimCNC (the new soft I used from Cslab now)

I do similar but my "pendant" is fixed.

Click for full size.

About Mach3 being interrupted by Windows, I'm afraid you may see them happening when you won't think about it.
Same as you, my shop PC has no internet access, and I try to disable whatever I can, and until recently, I did not notice any trouble (it's running W10 64bits)
But, I decided to upgrade it for good measure, and to speedup its boot time and responsiveness, so I changed the HDD to a SSD.
Very efficient ! But alas, here came the troubles. I think it is now so fast in disk I/O, compared to what it was, that when Defender passes (and it always passes, sooner or later, even if you have disabled it), it is not self regulated as it naturally was with a slow HDD (meaning the proc mostly waiting for the disk, so letting time for other tasks), now the SSD is more responsve and when Defender loops on some disk resources, it really takes a lot of cpu, and typically Mach3 is disturbed, you get the "hourglass" cursor (sorry I don't know the exact English for that) and it's no more responsive, and the CNC looses steps meanwhile...

In 13 years of use I have never had any of those problems. I use a NUK with Win64 and an SSD, but in the beginning it was an old computer on XP. I only ungraded when I was thinking about going to Mach4. "hourglass cursor" is fine in English and is exactly how I would phrase it.

So for me, unless you have a modern fast PC with plenty of cores, Linux is far much reliable to run a software that needs somewhat real time responsiveness.

I did look at CNCLinux or is it LinuxCNC? but IIRC it only had parallel port O/P not ethernet and no Galil controller support.