Wow, time flies; thanks for checking in!
This project got pushed down the list over the last number of months but the PC is in (HP Z230, i7, 8GB RAM) and I managed to cobble together a box for my Ethernet Smoothstepper with a decent power supply along the way.
We started again a few weeks ago and ran into all sorts of problems and bizarre behaviour; we'd get the router to move for a couple of minutes, but as soon as we encountered an error, we were dead in the water until I reinstalled Mach 3 and the ESS plugin from scratch.
Fast forward to yesterday, after a lot of testing, I determined that the Zenbot table doesn't like the Mach 3 defaults and the Zenbot provided XML doesn't play nicely with the ESS plugin, so I manually entered the parameters from Zenbot's ports and pins config and home/limits config, and set A as the slave for Y, suddenly I have almost a functional CNC machine! X and Y behave beautifully, no problem finding home or running g-code, but the Z axis if still giving me grief. When RefAllHome with Machine coord selected, the Z axis moves downwards looking for the home switch which of course is at the top of the Z-axis travel.
Later today I'll go over the Z config, comparing the Zenbot parameters to the Mach 3 parameters to see if I can clear it up, but if anybody has any ideas, I'm all ears. It sure feels good to finally be able to prove that I'm talking to the router finally and not running around in circles!