Originally Posted by
bluejay_ca
The basic idea is that your cnc program will provide a step and a direction signal for each motor (5vdc). That means that you will run a pair of wires from your parallel port to each drive. The drive will provide 4 high power output wires to be connected to each motor (3 if a servo). The drive is powered from a seperate power supply.
A single parallel port has 12 outputs, pins # 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,14,16,17
A single parallel port has 5 inputs, pins # 10,11,12,13,15
Pins 18 thru 25 are ground.
You may want to have overtravel switches mounted and wire them to the drives or as an input to your cnc software. Home switches, e-stop as well as enable signals may be considered as crucial options.
Hope this helps.