Beginners Controller Question

You could look at the Geckodrive G540, though that too is only 3.5A.

You might want to consider the closed-loop stepper drives available from Leadshine.
That would be an individual drive for each axis, but that might not be a bad thing, it allows axis-level repair rather than looking for a whole new G540. These have performance rather closer to a servo than a stepper.
www.amazon.com/Leadshine-Stepper-86HBM80...-D1008/dp/B06ZY1KWLY

The 4-axis cards tend to use TB6560 or TB6600 chips, and those won't drive 6A steppers. So you are likely to be looking at individual drives anyway.

The parallel port will work, but is limited on step rate and IO pins (you will need to share limit swith inputs, for example, and won't be able to use a high-count spindle encoder). There is no harm in starting with a p-port then upgrading to something more capable (Pico. Mesa, General Mechatronics etc) later.

MatthewMachinist wrote:

Computer with Ubuntu, Linux CNC and parallel port or better.

The LinuxCNC LiveCD will install a suitable version of Linux, you don't need to install the OS first.
(if the machine currently boots in to Windows then I think that the installer will allow for dual-boot configuration).

You have a choice of two installers:

This one is based on a reasonably up to date version of Debian Stretch and uses the preempt-rt kernel. This might not have good enough latency for parallel port step generation on some hardware (though I have one PC where is gives better latency than I have ever seen with RTAI). It is compatible with the Mesa ethernet-connecte cards and I would suggest trying it first.
www.linuxcnc.org/testing-stretch-rtpreempt/
Choose the latest (Oct 18) image that suits your hardware (32 bit or 64 bit is the choice, ignore the Intel / AMD part, it isn't a split based on chipset manufacturer)


This LiveCD image will install Debian Wheezy and an RTAI kernel. It will often have better software step generation potential than the preempt-rt version but is an older version of Linux that might not install succesfully on the most modern motherboards.
Debian Wheezy went out of long-term-support last year.
www.linuxcnc.org/linuxcnc-2.7-wheezy.iso

More details on how to create a bootable image from the .iso files here:
linuxcnc.org/docs/2.7/html/getting-start...etting-linuxcnc.html

If you prefer to run Ubuntu or Mint then that is possible (instructions on the page above, and on this forum) but it is a little more effort especially if you are new to Linux.