Hi

I'm building a new controller for a leath using EMC.

Most of the electronics in the leath were lightning struck, so were junk, the heavier stuff was OK. Using two parallel ports, I have every thing mostly working under control of EMC except the stepper motors...

They are apparently a high end (for their day) 5 phase motor with 10 leads in a non-stared configuration. The drive amps are OK, so will reuse them, but they need a +/- 8 volt 5 phase sine wave to drive them. The manufacture (South Bend) had used a micro processor to control 5 digital-to-analog convertors. This way they could make a sine wave that could be run at a wide range of frequencies and even frozen or reversed. Slick.

I dicided to follow their lead and do much the same thing, just with a bit newer processor.
Has anyone already done something like this? If so, do you have a design or any design tips that could save me some hassle?

I'm a bit undecided if it would be better to use step/dir. or speed/dir. control. It seems to me that speed and direction would be better as it would involve less communication between the PC and the signal generator via a parallel port.