Tandem Stepper Motors

I have a project with two stepper motors driving a single axis.  The motors are connected to the axis hub with T5 16mm belts.  So they should almost never fall out of step with each other.

The robot is 5-DOF but has six motors and I would like to keep all the steppers on the Mesa card.  With a Mesa 7i96S can I drive two stepper drivers, in parralell, from a single step/gen output? 

 

Normally, yes.

If the drives have PUL+ and PUL- you can
wire the outputs (assuming channel 4):

Drive 1

PUL+ -->  7I96S STEP4+
PUL- --> 7I96S GND
DIR+ --> 7I96S DIR4+
DIR-  --> 7I96S GND

Drive 2

PUL+ -->  7I96S +5V
PUL- --> 7I96S STEP4-
DIR+ --> 7I96S +5V
DIR-  --> 7I96S DIR4-

So you do not double the loading
on the 7I96S step/dir outputs