electronics for my CNC Router Parts machine

Hi community,

I have bought a CNC Router Parts kit, am now thinking about the electronics. Because I'm new to the world of CNC, I'd like to order their plug-and-play control box . The latest incarnation of this control box comes with an ethernet smoothstepper, which does not work with LinuxCNC. CNC Router Parts allows me to order the control box without smoothstepper. But then how do I connect my computer to the control box? In the control box are two break-out boards. So I think I have two options.

1. A direct connection through two parallel ports in the computer, LinuxCNC in software stepping mode.
2. Connect through a card, e.g. the mesa 5i25, LinuxCNC in hardware stepping mode.

I think I prefer hardware stepping over software stepping. The mesa 5i25 seems to be a good option. In the 5i25 documentation I read about different firmware's, depending on the break-out boards that it connects to. I don't know what firmware would be appropriate to connect the mesa 5i25 to the break-out boards in the CNC Router Parts control box.

So my question is: is it possible to connect the mesa 5i25 to the break-out boards in the CNC Router Parts control box and if so, what 5i25 firmware to use.

Attached a few documents I received from CNC Router Parts and which they kindly allow me to post on this forum.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

You can use any parallel breakout card, or a 5i25 card. I think you would need a 7i76 also (not sure. don't know if 5i25 works by itself)

I would go for the parallel breakout card. Everyone with mach3 wanted a smoothstepper to take the load off of the pc. with so many configurations, and problems with different computers, this is in cncrouterparts best interest, to limit help requests because of factors beyond their control.

I have a crp4848 and I use a cncrouterparts breakoutboard that is no longer produced, running on the parallel port.
It's been running over 2 years without a single problem.

I would get it without any of the breakout cards they use. It looks like it is setup for 2 ports, but they only are utilizing 1 ports worth of I/O.
Look at cnc4pc.com look at their c10 card, it seems to be popular, and a good price.

This is a pic of the card I use. Not sure why they stopped selling it, but I am happy with it.

I believe their crp-5042 is a rebranded Kelling 5042 driver.
You can see it's specs here
www.automationtechnologiesinc.com/produc...epping-driver-kl6852

You can use a 5i25 to drive that board, the mx3660 and g540 configurations are close
and will work for 4 axis pinouts. If you want all 5 axis support and a hardware PWM gen on
pin 1 of the second port, that will require a custom pinout which is pretty simple
for me to do if I have a a few minutes of spare time.

Thanks very much for the info. There's a lot of information on the cnc4pc site, I have some reading up to do.

Your answer, as well as alan_3301's answer, seems to point in a direction away from the cncrouterparts control box. I could instead buy, from cncrouterparts, their 4-Axis DIY Nema 23 Electronics Kit , which I can connect to my computer via e.g. a mesa 5i25 card. Is that something you would recommend?

Thanks to both of you.

Yes I like that kit with the gecko g540. I had that kit on another machine I built for 3 years with no problem. I was running straight from the parallel port.

There are people out there that have had problems with the g540, but you will probably find people that had problems with any driver.
It is about as simple as it gets to wire up, everything is handled for you inside the case.