Excellent!
I actually spoke to someone at PocketNC and that is what they told me.I didn't realise that educational users were exempt from these draconian restrictions. Are you certain?
It probably hasn't had a lot of testing. There just aren't that many users with 4ths running. By all means, test the hell out of it.When I say 4th axis, I mean simultaneous ("continuous" in your parlance) 4 axis operation, rather than "just" indexed 4th axis. 5th axis operation in any form isn't likely to happen with me any time soon. Is 4th axis continuous operation reasonably stable now?
A chrisb noted the Centroid post is really old. It was written for some of their old big-iron not for the little Acorn. I've had a chance to play with the Acorn and was impressed with the hardware but disappointed with the artificial limitations that Centroid built into the cheap tier control software.The Shiz has Centroid Acorn, which seems to have a Freecad post processor. That's a good start....
The hardware seems to be doing the hard realtime stuff on a Beaglebone green with the control running on the PC. This is almost exactly the model that Machinekit was pushing after they forked from LinuxCNC. I always wondered if the Acorn firmware could be replaced with Machinekit. That would be a really impressive control for not a lot of $$.
The present control software has a hard limit (very low) on the number of lines of gcode that it can process. It would be fun to write a custom post for the acorn that could take a big gcode file and split it into pieces with a retract and pause at the end of each file. Then the hobbyist would have to load each file in turn but could process really big files without paying for the upgrade.