[Knucks]

I'm relatively new to the forum and CNC in general. That being said, I am 3 semesters in to a CNC degree at my local comm. college. Im learning how to program on the Haas machines at school and they seem to be very capable. However, my home machine is lacking several capabilities that I wish to implement pretty quickly if possible. My home set up is a BF20 (G0704) mill that has been ''CNCed". I bought the mill with the current drives, motors ect... already installed and i guess my real trouble is exactly that. My mill is not set up with several options and Im noticing its limitations. My current set up is as follows.
Old PC (runs fine) with Mach3, going straight to 3 Parker drives, (E-AC) http://www.parker.com/portal/site/PA...VE&Wtky=MOTORS
,in turn going straight to the x,y,z steppers. This is a simplified explanation of my current set up, but does anyone else see something missing in this equation? A breakout board, right!!?
As I said before Im new to this and Im even newer to the building/upgrading of machines. Therefore, Im trying my best to not get ahead of myself or to say too much, and in turn, show too much ignorance. Again, that being said I still have yet to find(in many days of goggleing) an example of a machine wired without a breakout board.
This poses a problem for me, in that, I really want to add some things to the machine that weren't integrated from the start. To begin, I would like to add home limit switches, spindle speed control, and some variation of the touch probes that Ive seen circulating on the forums.
From my research, i gather that this can't be done without some sort of breakout board. I have recently purchased a copy of Hoss' plans for these upgrades(for those of you who are familiar with this guy,I'm sure i dont need to tell you, he got some good stuff), so i dont really need help with the building of the parts. What I need is some direction with integrating a breakout board(i think so anyway).
Ive been doing my homework and one option is to buy a C11 from cnc4pc http://www.cnc4pc.com/Store/osc/prod...ed3f8a576ec630. I was looking at this board because it appears to have an ''in'' (from PC) and an ''out'' (to "Your current setup"). Is this a viable option for me? Are there any less expensive alternatives that would be a solution to my problems? Am I even headed in the right direction?
Any and all responses are appreciated, and dont be affraid to "dumb it up" for me as well. Great forum here, with a wealth of knowledge if ya dont mind doing a little reading.---- Humbly yours, Knucks.

[Knucks]

Not getting any responses here. If anyone could suggest a new section of the forum to post in or anything, it would be greatly appreciated. Talk to me fellas! Bump...

[doorknob]

I do not have direct experience with that stepper driver, nor do I have direct experience with the C11 BOB, but I have a few comments that may be useful to you.

Looking at the driver manual at http://divapps.parker.com/divapps/em...Inst_Rev_A.pdf, page 22, it appears that the driver input is optoisolated. The C11 BOB also appears to use onboard optoisolators, and it does not appear that you can bypass them. So, in effect, if you use the C11 you will be driving each signal with two optoisolators in series, which is not a recommended configuration (because it can lead to unwanted "softening" of the signals). So I don't think that the C11 is the right BOB for you.

Were you planning to use the C11's spindle control circuitry? If not, then you might want to consider the CNC4PC C10 board which does not have onboard optoisolators (but it also does not have onboard spindle control - if you need that, however, CNC4PC makes separate boards that can add that functionality).