Hello. I was unable to post in the 'welcome to the forum' bit so before diving into the conversion question I have, a little about me. I'm a keen tinkerer, building and fixing anything that catches my interest. I primarily build combat robots, but have undertaken go karts, BBQs, RC planes and lots of other projects over the years.

The problem:

I recently took ownership of a Denford Triac milling machine and am looking to convert it to Mach 3 using the existing drivers. So far following a superb forum thread on the Denford site I've added the Step and Dir lines for the X,Y and Z axis. These all work if connected to ground. I've built a simple transistor amplifier circuit to switch these 24v lines from a 5v BOB. I've got them doing individual steps by touching onto the 5v output from the BOB but I can't for the life of me work out how to get Mach 3 to output the voltage pulses I need.

As far as I know I have configured Mach 3 correctly, as per the tutorials on their site. I am using one of the generic unbranded 5axis CNC breakout boards, and can't get any outputs to switch on. I was hoping I would be able to read around 5v on one of the Dir outputs, I thought these held either 5v or 0v to determine whether the stepper turns clockwise or counterclockwise, but I'm getting 0v from every pin regardless of how I jig the axis in Mach 3.

Any help or advice much appreciated.

Thanks, Dan.