Stepgen and 4-phase steppers

I was hoping for a simpler way, but thank you, that should work.

You could possibly do it in hardware, by modifying a charge-pump circuit
www.artofcnc.ca/ChargePumpSafety.pdf
The relay could switch the drives into a lower-current mode.

Do the drives have any current limit, or are you running at DC and relying on the motor resistance to limit the current? That is a very hot and low-performance way to do it.

It might be best to buy some off-the-shelf step-direction chips with current limiting and choppers. Though when 4-axis chopper drives are $60 on eBay it might not be worth the trouble. You would gain a lot more pins too,

(edit)
I just remembered who you are, and we have already been through this. Sorry.

Hi,
may I ask you a question. I would like to control a small stepper motor with a L298N driver via parallel port. For this I need 4 wires/pins because it is not step/direction method. How shall I configure linuxcnc for such a task? I think there was a video on youtube how to do it, but unfortunately I cannot find it anymore.

I would like to know how to connect A B C D wires to parallel port and how to configure stepconfig.

Thanks!

You can wire both enable pins to the same output or just wire them to +5V logic, but the other two input need outputs for control.
On the LinuxCNC side make a normal stepper config and edit the hal file to stepgen mode 2 as that would give quadrature signals on two outputs instead of the usual step/dir signals.
So in the hal file near the top of it, there should be something like this Edit that to this P.S.
Beware that the cheap L298 drives do not have current limiting and will burn to a crisp if powered by more than 5 to 8V, depending on the motors used.

Thanks. How about this case: I wire 4 wires from stepper to L298N. From L298N I get another 4 wires (in1...in4), which I put into parallel port pins 2, 3, 4, 5. Now I have to enable pins in the sequence 2, 4, 3, 5 to move stepper motor one step.

I use this L298N driver: sigmatechbd.com/product/l298-stepper-motor-drive/
And a dvd rom stepper motor.

Yeah, those require 4 pins and each has to be stepped by the PC, and those are exactly the ones i was talking about regarding powering them.
Have a look here:
forum.linuxcnc.org/10-advanced-configura...posing-a-pic?start=0
there is also a config attached that works for exactly that type of drives, it has everything set up for X and Y axis, the Z axis is used as PWM. Pins 6 to 9 are for X and pins 17,1,16,14 are fo Y axis.