I want to use Mach3... If I have Baldor DC Servo drive for X & Y, TSD-050-05-2-U  running Baldor DC Servo Motors  BK-2250's  ....   I need help finding out how I connect these drives to a PC

To run Mach3...

1. do I need a breakout board... if so what can you recommend?
2. Do I basically have to go from PWM to Step/Dir   with a breakout board or something?  or is there a board that does PWM from Mach3...

People are telling me I lose "real CNC" or I am not doing "real CNC" with Mach3 and servo drives/servo motors cause the Mach3 and the controller just do Step/Dir ...  if it's equal then I guess I don't care... but am I just buying servo to convert it to step/dir...

help!
Brian
 

If your servo drives are analogue  voltage command only, ie +/-10v command and not capable of Step/Dir then you will need to use one of the external controllers that work with Mach and can control analogue drives.

There are a few,
 CSMIO/IP-A
 DSPMC
 Galil
 Kflop with Kanalog.

I use the CSMIO/IP-A on my Chiron FZ12 and it is an excellent choice.

Hood

Ok, update... I got the Baldor DC Drives that go with the motors... so should be good there...   looking at the Galil DMC-21X3 Ethernet controller ...  they offer two daughter cards to split out the axis for D-Sub connections  ...  do I need  opto-isolated I/O ?    this DMC-21X3 seems to work good with Mach3 and does the servo analog control of the drives...

anything I should look out for?

I dont know too much about the Galil and Mach, the cost of the Galil and its associated breakouts and connectors was very high so I never went down that road.
You will likely get answers to any questions you have regarding Galil and Mach if you ask on the Galil section of the forum.
Hood