Physicist trying to do engineering. Not going well. After advice with 4 axis gantry.

[dr_rob]

Hello everyone,

I have been reading posts on this forum for the last few months, but have gotten to the point where I need some help.

I have put together a 4 axis gantry (picture attached) which I would like to control from my PC. I have 4 motors (NEMA 34, NEMA 23XL, NEMA 23 and a NEMA 17) which come with inbuilt encoders, but for now I will not be using the encoders. But may wish to in the future. The gantry is going to be used to drive a microphone around near a speaker.

My current problem is that I am a little stuck on how to actually control the system. I have 2 power supplies (to run 2 motors each) and 4 microstep drivers (3 MSD752, and 1 MSD880 from Motion Control). I think I have powered each of the micro-controllers up, and the motors. But where I am getting rather lost is what data to send to the drivers.

I have a parallel port which is connected to a RoutOut CNC break out board.

From many of the videos and blogs I have seen people have been using MACH software to send data to the BoB (their BoB's look to be a lot fancier than mine however!) and then onto the drivers. My issue is that I can't install MACH3 software (which most people look to use, I can install MACH 4 however) and am not too sure how to send data to the drivers without it.

I was wondering if anyone out there has any simple advice on how I could control the motors using the BoB I have.

Sorry for this being such a stupid questions but I've gotten myself into that stage where I am reading about stuff which might well be way too detailed for what I am trying to do!

Any advice would be very much appreciated.

Rob