Emcoturn 120 lathe retrofit

so does one of the Mesa cards do the step processing? then would it be apples to apples with that and the CNC4PC C32 or one of the other Mesa breakouts? would be good because the Mesa is 1/2 the cost of the smooth stepper ethernet card.

the Dell FX170 arrived today as well as the ball screw grease, 24vdc, 5vdc power supplies (thx tome) and the small rj45 BOB.

LutzTD wrote: the smooth stepper I use is the Ethernet version, would that make any difference for linux?

Not really, there is no smooth-stepper driver for LinuxCNC. It is not impossible that one could be written, but the way the smoothstepper works is basically to move all the motion control into the smoothstepper.
The LinuxCNC equivalents (Pico PPMC, Mesa 5i25 + 7i76. General Mechatronics) only move step-generation into the hardware, and the hardware still depends on regular position updates every 1mS.

If I get rid of the smooth stepper though, my thin client computer does not have 2 parallel ports nor can they be added, so I would need to bridge the gap from the thin client to the i/o pcb for a linux install. Would I need to go to a PC and add parallel port cards or something like that?

You can probably run a lathe in basic mode from a single parallel port. You only really need 4 outputs for 2 axes of step/dir and 5 inputs for axis limits and spindle encoder.

For little more than your C32 board you could get a mesa 7i76E, and eliminate items 2,3 and 4 from your shopping list. (it is the breakout, spindle encoder counter, vfd control, and hardware step-generator, all in one.

But if you already have your heart set on, or already have that other stuff a configuration could probably be put together that could directly replace a smoothstepper using a 7i92.

One benifit of using Linuxcnc over Mach might be that Linuxcnc can generate other step output paterns than just step/dir. CW/CCW and quadrature as well as a few more obscure options are available. (I think those vexta drives may use CW/CCW.)

I am a newb so forgive me if it sounds like I have my heart set on the smooth stepper or the C32 PCB. Its just what I know so I use that as a baseline. In addition to the above I/O I will need toolchanger control. Basically the toolchanger will use tome's Toolerator 3000 which has an onboard arduino so I think it just needs an additional output for the tool call and an input for the tool set signal. not sure what cc/ccw means. Does the vexta not use step and direction?

CW/CCW is an abbreviation for ClockWise/Counter ClockWise. and I think that those drives use that input system. The drives expect step pulses on the CW input to turn clockwise, and pulses on the CCW input to turn counter-clockwise.

I am completely ignorant of your tool changer arrangement, and the need for the "Toolerator 3000" and exactly what it does. How did the original control operate the tool changer, and what might be the difficulties of reusing the old systems?