Hello All,
    To anyone who has followed this you know I followed the instructions supplied by the seller of my servo drives & motors & had no response from the motors when I thought I was good to go.After a lot of help and advise from the GREAT members of this forum it was determined the drives don't play well with the single ended signals supplied by BOB to drives, really need differential line drivers.Was also determined the BLOCK WIRING DIAGRAM for drives & Mach 3 were INCOMPLETE AND INACCURATE !! Power was not being supplied to the drive control,the drive inhibit,cw inhibit & ccw inhibits were ALL active,(hard to get anything out of drives with all those inhibits activated). And the "servo on" input was not being powered. HELL, no wonder it didn't work,the control wasn't powered and if it had been the drive was  'turned off' about 4 different ways.Them there was some mighty fine instructions I got with the drives.
    Well I still don't have the line drivers yet but not seeing these motors work was driving me NUTS,(some would say that's a pretty short drive). So I reconfigured the inputs and decided to see if anything would happen given the single ended step/dir signals.
    Progress Update
                               I Have motors that move !!

    At this point I have seen all 3 motors work and one drive seems OK. I only "rigged" one input cable and thus far only have one encoder cable made and didn't swap them to the other 2 drives for a test but I have more confidence now that they are OK. I connected all 3 motors (one at a time of course),jogged them with Mach and ran each one through the "auto gain tuning" routine built into the drives.YIPPIE! I do have a problem though, when jogging in Mach the motors only rotate one way. The auto gain tuning routine rotates motor 2 revs each way back & forth several times at increasing speeds and that worked as it should so I know motors CAN rotate both ways, just isn't doing it through Mach jogging. The motor does rotate when jogging either way, but it's the SAME direction for pgup/pgdn and also the same way when using Z+/Z- on the MPG flyout. Any ideas what's going on?
            Rick

Might double check with a meter that the dir signal is actually changing at each termination point while changing jog directions.
Also, good to see it's moving, but, mine looked real good initially single ended also. Actually ran very well until I noticed it missing position randomly by about .001 - .002". The line drivers made it rock solid.
You'll git er',
Russ

also, be sure the drive is configured for s&d and not cw-ccw.

Howdy Russ,
    I'm looking over parameters now to see if I can notice a problem. When you suggest checking with a meter at termination point am I understanding that the com & + should switch places where they leave the BOB. What I mean is if I connect meter to gnd & dir  at BOB, jog one way meter would read say, 5v,then when jogging the other way without moving meter leads it should read -5v?         
                         Rick

It will read 0v the other way as you are just single ended, so 5v or 0v.
Hood

Thanks for clearing that up Hood,
      As I mentioned before the BOB is only outputting 3.3v on the dir out. So with meter connected I see 3.3v when jogging one way and 0.12v when jogging the other.
  Rick

Ok, its a shame the BOB is not buffering the paralell ports output as the nearer to 5v you are the better but differential should help with that anyway.
Regarding your signals, that should be fine but there will likely be specs of min and max voltages in the manual for your drives for the step/dir inputs. It looks likely that what Russ said about the CW/CCW mode may be your issue.
Hood

OK Hood,
    I'll hopefully have a better look through the manual tommorrow evening after work. I've had a pretty good day today by finally getting so see motors run. But sadly now my weekend of play must end, time for supper,shower and off to beddybye so I can be up early bright eyed & bushy tailed for another fun workweek. Least this one is a short one, Good Friday is paid day off for me.

    As always thanks,   Rick

OK guys,
    Here's what I think is going on. I have spent the evening looking the  manual over, checking parameters, made some changes,same result,changed them back,read Mach manual,read servo drive manual some more,,,My conclusion? I don't think it's a parameter problem, I think it comes back to the crappy instructions and the way the step/dir commands are being input to drive. Page 24 of the drive manual deals with position command input (pulse), it shows two ways to do it, A-by line drivers which they recommend (Hood did as well) or B-by open collector which I think is what Hood & some others have called single ended. Well I still don't have the line drivers so at this time the signals are single ended (open collector) BUT the way the instructions had me hooking things up I'm putting single ended signals where the line driver signals should go. so in effect the drive is seeing "half" what it should one direction & the other half when jogging the other direction. That sounds clear as mud even to me but if you would care to look at page 24 of the manual and then look at the connection instructions (all have been attached to earlier posts) maybe you can see the problem I think I see.
              Rick

p.s.  I REALLY need those line drivers.