I have a four drive control board and would like to use one to drive some thing else can I use a Y lead to connect X and A so this frees up a driver or can I add a fifth driver some how?

Mike

It's not a good idea to use a Y lead with stepper motors - one driver for each motor is best.

If you can gain access to the unused parallel port pins then there is no reason why you cannot just add another single axis driver.

Tweakie.

IS this a LPT version or outside controller ??

(;-) TP

At the moment I run the machine as a CNC but would like to try the 3D printer set up I need to run the extra driver for the exturder.

Mike

The only BOB i Know that will do parallel drives from one port is the CP0-10v from cnc4you.co.uk I have never seen this before but the manual lists it, probably have to use their drives though. This BOB has a separate power supply, that is likely how it works.

It can be done other ways but you will need some electronics to do the split properly, or you could find the tech specs for the BOB you have and the drives, check the current sink/source for output / input and if say the drives took 5mA and the BOB could give 15mA then it would likely work, or it should do no harm to test it I think.

If the BOB could only give out 7mA and the drives needed 5mA each it wouldn't have the power to run two units in parallel

I beieve the BOB from CandCNC can do slave with 1 axis driving 2 drives .

(;-) TP