Hi Blackrat,

Hoe gaan dit?

Simply put the Smoothstepper is a replacement for the parallel port (as you may already know). It receives motion commands from Mach3 (or 4 soon) and interprets them into step/direction or quadrature.This was previously done by the special parallel port driver that is shipped with Mach3. The speed and smoothness that it can do this is pretty impressive.
If you were to think of the board as a LPT replacement, the USB allows you to have 2 full parallel port and a few extra pins while the ethernet one is like having 3 parallel ports. This give you many input output pins to connect stuff up to.

You of course need the stepper motor or servo drivers to connect to. The Smoothstepper only control the input/output signals.

Personally I have found it to be the most cost effective semi plug and play solution. I say semi as you will need to install a plugin and tune it slightly.

If you have more specific questions I will try my best to answer them.

Totsiens. (We left Durban in '91)