Koue land indeed!

The smooth stepper actually replaces the need to have a parallel port. You plug in the Ethernet cable from the computer and then a ribbon cable from the smoothstepper to the BOB just like you would normally with the printer port. You could think, simplistically, that it is 3 external parallel ports stacked on one board. In terms of reliability, compared to the parallel port, you will see the difference straight away.

The only extra wiring you will need to do is get 5V to the smoothstepper.

You can run a pendant on the smoothstepper but there is not much documentation and I have not bothered to run one on there personally. The real draw back is how Mach3 deals with the pendant internally, Mach4 may fix that but I have not migrated there yet. What I did do though was buy a pendant from Vistacnc, the P4-SE . It is very well built and plugs into the USB, not had issues with it at all. You can even use it to mill with.

regards