So I'm at a loss with this one, initial setup of a new cnc conversion for a bridgeport knee mill.

I've been going through the setup steps, and have reached the "plug in the motor" step with each of the previous steps appearing to work fine.

upon doing so, powering on I can turn the motor manually, and feel somewhat higher resistance, not really "locking into place" like I was expecting.
Now continuing the test, I can turn the motor by hand, and the motor will "jumo' to what I assumed was the next step, it only jumps clockwise regardless of what direction I am turning the motor, adjusting the gecko's gain makes it jump measurably farther which makes me think the encoders are the problem.

The gecko itself will let me do this a few times, and then seems to stop correcting the motor, the resistance is there but I can turn it freely in either direction with no "jumps" the fault lights up on turning ccw exactly as during the encoder test, but not when turning cw (the direction it "wants" to turn)

Motors are magmotor s28-e-300's and encoders are sumtak lda-048-300's  I'm working on swapping the motor/encoder now to see if that helps but any advice is appreciated.

I may have figured it out, though it doesn't explain all of the behavior.

I checked voltage at the unit, and it is only putting out 2v-ish on the encoder 5v out

checking the encoder, it requires 150ma
checking the data sheet for the gecko, it only outputs 50ma

Which seems to be the problem, I've seen some documentation about adding pull-up resistors, but seem to be for a different reason, thoughts on a fix?