Originally Posted by
orangezero
Thanks for the reply. After some more searching on other forums, there are several people who have experience with adding a few extra steppers to a g540 via various ways.
I went ahead and ordered a gecko g251x and hope to connect it to the open pins on my gecko g540 board (as several have suggested) and continue to use it as a "breakout board."
It seems the Mesa cards are a lot more purpose built, but I'm still having a hard time justifying it over a dual parallel port pci card that has been confirmed to work with linuxcnc and is like $13 shipped. I'm not sure I need the extra features provided by the mesa cards, but I'm just using *lowly* stepper drivers, no closed loop, no spindle control, no probes, etc. (at least for now)