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« on: February 15, 2009, 08:02:31 AM »
Hi again,
I think that both of the boards you are thinking of building will be good. Personally I would prefer the Tom McGuire design as you could use a ready made Break out Board incorporating opto isolators etc for your LPT connection to the computer.
Providing you are only going to use the finished project for pcb drilling then any of the 0.6 to 0.8 Amp stepper motors you have would have enough torque for positioning the spindle as long as you keep the friction on your X,Y,Z slides low and use a high speed spindle such as a Dremel for the drilling. For pcb routing however, you would probably need more torque and have to upgrade the steppers for 1.5 to 2 Amp models but the driver boards you are looking at will handle this upgrade.
If you go for the Tom McGuire it would be handy if you could find someone local to yourself with a working machine to route the pcb for you as the GCode for the board is available for download.
All the best,
Tweakie.