Switch to Smooth Stepper

[Sage]

My mill has been working fine on a parallel port for years and I have no particular reason to change to a smooth stepper, but I purchased the smooth stepper a few years ago and it's been sitting on the shelf since. Perhaps waiting to apply it to another milling setup or just in case my mother board goes bad and I can't get one with a parallel port.
 Now I'm curious to see how it works.
 I have a PMDX breakout board in my driver box so it has the ability to accept the ribbon cables from the smooth stepper.

For the heck of it I installed Mach on an old laptop, copied my XML from my working machine and installed the smooth stepper. It seems to be happy.
Since the XML was copied, the ports and pins are set up the same between my working machine and the laptop with the smooth stepper.
 So, before I dig into my driver box, is this going to be a simple plug and play from the smooth stepper to the PMDX to achieve a machine working like my parallel port set up, or am I looking at a whole bunch of trouble?
 (understanding that I may have to tune some smooth stepper parameters of course)


Sage

[HimyKabibble]

It should be a pretty painless transition.  The one place you *may* be in for some changes is spindle control.  Most everything else should just work pretty much as-is.  You should make a copy of your existing XML, so you can easily go back if you need to.

Regards,
Ray L.

[Sage]

No spindle control here, so no problem.
The original XML is safe from my my original computer and I'll save the Smooth Stepper xml from the laptop as well.
I'm sort of procrastinating on what I'm supposed to be doing today so maybe I'll give it a try.

Thanks

Sage

[Sage]

Well !! That was easy. Just plugged it in and away it went. Can't notice any difference from the old parallel port connection. Good stuff.

Sage