5 Axis Stepper board on ebay

It looks like a much better quality version of what I started with. I reckon it will be fine. 36V / 3.5A will actually drive some fairly hefty NEMA23 steppers.
The ones here should give you 2Nm at 300rpm or so at the max voltage for that board.
www.slidesandballscrews.com/sy60sth88300...118.html?cPath=45_81

Apropros of nothing, I just found these:
www.slidesandballscrews.com/nema-motor-cover-ip40-p-628.html

That would have saved a lot of messing about!

Clever kinematics is one thing that EMC2 is good at.

Rather than a second parport, look at the Mesa 7i43 instead. That plugs into the parport and expands it to 48 IO lines. It also moves the step generation, pwm generation and encoder counting into hardware.

My similar board didn't like me wiring the motors wrongly, so be careful there. I see that one has a fan on the heatsink, and that might help a lot. the one I had was passively cooled.

bvandiepenbos wrote:

I got the (2) boards today, sure looks confusing...the poorly translated Chinese docs don't help. I am feeling maybe I made a bad choice?
Oh well, just need to dig into it and see what happens.

It ought to just be a case of figuring out which pin in the connector is step/dir for each motor, then telling Stepconf.

question: would it be safer to start with setting the amp output dip switches to lowest setting so I don't burn things up?

Maybe, though it won't prevent you blowing the drivers if you mix up the A and B phases, or disconnect a motor with the drives powered up. Just be very careful and very sure about the motor connections, the logic/control connections will just not work if you confuse them.
Typical "gotchas" with these boards are a parallel cable which doesn't connect all the pins (it is not unknown for a Laplink cable to be supplied with the boards) and for the documentation to actual refer to a different model. It's all part of the fun.

how can I figure what amps these need? since it only gives 6.2ohms specs?

Try Google of the part number for a fuller spec. Otherwise start at the lowest current and the increase it until the motors get too hot. (perhaps get some thermal stickers?) Too hot is very hot, by the way. Google says 90C is fine.
Google also says:
www.xmarkcomputers.com/stepper.pdf
That they are 0.8A/phase (Those are slightly feeble steppers, compared to others I have seen)
You probably want to ignore the black and the white wires (those are for unipolar operation).

There is a wealth of information on the EMC Wiki site about steppers.

wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emcinfo.pl?Stepper_Formulas

John