Hi,
I'm not familiar with your RNR board. What I can tell from the pic is that it is a USB connected motion control board. That multi-pinned square
IC in the center of the board is a microcontroller/DSP/FPGA. Its job is to decode the numeric data sent to it by your PC via Mach and the .dll
plugin over the USB and turn that data into pulse streams for your motors. That makes it way WAY smart....even if it doesn't support a probe.
The second board you linked to is a parallel breakout board, its got no microcontroller/DSP/FPGA. The PC produces the pulse streams
by virtue of Machs parallel port driver and communicates to the board over the parallel port cable. The breakout board is just an amplifier,
it doesn't do anything smart. The USB port on the board is just a way of powering the board from the PC's power supply, here is no communication
on it. In fact if you used a separate power supply for the board you could disconnect the USB and the board would still work.
Mach's parallel port CAN handle a probe, that's the good news. Mach's parallel port works on Desktop PC's (no laptops) with XP or Windows 7 32bit.
No 64 bit Windows will run Mach's parallel port driver. No USB to parallel converter will work either. Even if you have a 32bit Win7/XP PC you must be really
careful not to load ANY other software on it because it will interfere with Mach and stop it. In short there are quite a few limitations with a parallel port,
it has a slow pulse rate and is inclined to stall/stop/stutter depending on the PC. It is free and its how Mach got going in the first place. A lot of people
still use it but many have gone to an external motion controller.
The problem is there are a lot of crap external controllers out there which don't support all Machs features, you have one.
If you bought a good one like a SmoothStepper, UC300ETH or a PoKeys 57CNC you would never look back. Don't buy s*********t Chinese or Russian or Martian...
buy US or European and don't buy off EBay or AliExpress they are full of ripoffs, buy direct from the manufacturer or their nominated distributor.
You have three choices:
1) Stick with your existing board BUT WITHOUT a probe
2) Buy a parallel port breakout board and use an old XP clunker PC, even a cheap ($30-$60) breakout board is adequate
3) Buy a decent, well supported external motion controller, anticipate such a device will cost from as low as $120 up to about $250 for a more capable
board with more inputs and outputs.
Craig