Ethercat boards and hardware

Hello
I know about the mesa cards and been eying them a lot and thinkng about getting one for my future CNClab BUT.
i found Ethercat and found that solution with connecting drivers ect with a simple ethernet cable and hat seems like a sturdy communication protocol.
the thing is i want to experiment with smaller motors and im fairly new to PLC components, most ethercat drivers and such are for larger and expensive motors.
does anyone know of a form of breakout board that i can use to send step/dir to for example a A4988 driver, i have a lot of old 3d printer hardware laying about. or could the add-ons for the EK1100 for digital output/input work for this? 
i'm just trying to get started with my lab so i can play around with different setups and learn linuxcnc thoroughly, a mesa card i probably in the future but atm my fixation is on ethercat.
 

There is a Beckhoff StepGen module for the ek1100 but its pretty expensive. Most people would use a seperate Ethercat driver from Lichuan, Leadshine or Rtelligent. From experience, I do think it would be a better bet to buy a kit with matching motor and driver to avoid compatibility issues. Lichuan have a 4 axis driver and I think also Nema17 and Nema23 options.

Thank you for the tip.
i currently just setting up a lab/Prototyping so don't need thing to work flawlessly just enough to test things, so trying to get away cheaply witch seems a bit hard with ethercat.

so mainly IO board that you could output LinuxCNC stepper signals out of would be ideal but it seems really hard to find at least when it comes to Ethercat, if i was more versed in electronics i would probably try and develop my own Ethercat board and open source it for other experimenters.

here is some info on a cheap ethercat stepper drive. But it is not as cheap as your A4988.
4 axis stepper drive

Don't use EtherCAT if you want to use a step/dir driver.
There are advantages to skip the intermediate step with
step/dir for steppers and analog +-10V for servos.
The right way is to have a EtherCAT drive that controls the
motor directly, skipping that middle step.

I have built an EtherCAT board that gives step/dir signals.
But it's not the right way to go.