Hi, for my DIY laser cutter, I am going to use 4 stepper motors for the Y axis, and 2 for the X. The 2 for the X I have already tried with my CNC controller and Mach 3, and they work beautifully. However, reading the specification sheet on the stepper driver chips, they are only rated for around 1.5A continous each, 2 steppers just falls under this limit, however 4 seems like a bit too much for 1 driver.

My CNC controller is just a generic 4 axis Chinese board, however I was wondering, is there a way to have mach3 output Y axis pulses to 2 sets of pins? I don't htink there is, and if not, I can simply connect the step and dir pins from 1 chip to the other, but if I could do it in software, no point wasting solder

Cheers,
Dan

You can set up an axis to be a slave of another axis for example if you have X, Y Z and A axis defined in Mach you can go to Config menu then Slave axis and can define the axis you wish to be slaved with one of the masters, so you want A as Y slave. Then when ever you command a Y move the A will get exactly the same pulses as the Y is getting.
Hood

Ah, perfect! Cheers Hood