setting up Emco compact 5 PC

oh for turret? does that require a separate motor driver or is it on the emco board? I really want to add one!

If you search around long enough on the internet you'll find links to the setup you have, where you are driving the machine by sending signals to the stepper drives from a parallel port.

My machine I gave up on that and replaced the stepper motors with modern ones (simple unbolt and replace - same form factor Nema 23 and 1/4" shaft). I also replaced all the legacy electronics - while intriguing, they are just not useful in a practical sense and it was easier (faster) for me to replace them.

Long story short - I don't know where the original turret motor control was located, but it was only maybe 2 relays (forward and reverse/hold at half voltage)..
My turret is now controlled by Linuxcnc through a modified component, though you could also just use the original control as well.

Mike

Interesting I'm going to check it out! I bought my Emco with 2 control boxes tried doing the modification for Mach 3 but it didn't work. I'm probably going to try and figure out what went wrong with the Mach 3 mod first.

Thanks for your reply

FWIW there isn't functionally much to choose between Mach3 and LinuxCNC for a mill, but for a lathe LinuxCNC is significantly better.
(Enough so that when Tormach wanted to make a lathe they switched everything over to LinuxCNC)

This is the info I remember seeing, an article on converting an EMCO Compact 5 PC to Mach 3 by connecting to the electronics (mild butchering required).
Digital machinist article

This is just as applicable to using LinuxCNC to send the step and direction pulses. Samco did some work way back when on an interface... 
CNC zone thread

Regards,
Mike