Hello from Reading

[sgreven]

By way of introduction, I got my Mill nearly 4 years ago, and had many an enjoyable hour/day/weekend making all sorts of things, some practical, some beautiful, some very impractical, and some downright ugly:) I relocated from South Africa to the UK, 9 months ago, and in the move, either somewhere over the sea, or somewhere in customs, some things got damaged on the Mill. The mechanical damage was thankfully mostly cosmetic, and has been repaired, however the electronics is a different story.

I chastise myself for not learning how everything worked while it still worked, however it was so much easier to just use the mill to mill circuit boards, than to understand how the drivers actually worked. I now find myself having to do this, and hope that I can draw on the experience of this group to try help me get it working again.

here are some pictures of my mill during happier times.



I won't do into detail about the tests that I have done so far, however I have isolated the problem to the Breakout Board.

Basically as soon as I plug in the parallel port, the 5v circuit draws nearly 700 mA and the poly fuse gets really hot. I cannot see any obvious shorts, and nothing measures short on the board. Basically I would like to get some advise on a decent Breakout Board. My Stepper drivers are M542 Microstep Drivers. I have 3 Axis limit switches (Electronic limit switches, currently configured pull-up), one tool-setter with e-stop and an estop on the front panel and override button.

The current BOB that I have has a 24v supply isolated with optoisolators (I suspect it is to better deal with noise), however any advice in this regard will be greatly appreciated.