Advice on component selection.

NeoTech wrote:

So i got some help from a gentleman on youtube that suggested this card would work.

That would be me. I don't know if I have been accused of being a Gentleman before

LinuxCNC is based around the idea of doing the motion control inside a PC. This means that you can see what is going on and that can be very useful for fault-finding and tuning compared to using smart drives that do the motion control internally.

This typically means using analog-input velocity-mode drives, but not always. It is possible to achieve the same result using a step-dir stream as a velocity command, and there is nothing inherently bad about using step-dir servos as something that the system sees as stepper motors, except that the motion-controller inside LinuxCNC knows a lot more about what you are trying to do than the drive ever can (there is no scope for velocity-feedforward in step-dir mode, as an example)

However, I don't think that a mini-PCIe to PCIe converter will work. Those slots are typically only compatible with WiFi cards.

That is a very cute PC board, but unless you have already bought it, there may be better options.

In practice the performance of the Parport-connected Mesa cards is no better or worse than the PCI ones in LinuxCNC applications though. I run both in my workshop.

NeoTech wrote:

I was starting too oogling the 7i80HD-25 card actually. But it seems to be a hassle to configure as well for a total newb.

Indeed, I wouldn't recommend it for someone in your position.

At this point I would say that you should see what motors and drives you can find, then choose the interface hardware.