I was a bit undecided whether I should butt in on this thread or open a near identical one - A coin toss anmd the fact that two others have done the same convinced me to join the thread - I hope the OP forgives me.

The situation is that I acquired a Denford Novamill some 5 years ago and begun the process of converting it to run Mach3 on a PC over a parallel port. When it was almost ready for commissioning I was seduced by 3D printers and spent the time until now building a string of ever more complicated printers. Now I find myself yearning for my old love but having to accept that parallel ports are a thing of the past and that the hard won knowledge of how to rework a CNC mill is now irrelevant. I hope that somebody can answer a few questions

The present status is that I had replaced the Denford Surestep controller with electoronics which were pretty standard then. The principal box shown below has an Optoport V2 board, a Spindle V3 board and three 4.2A Chinese stepper drivers along with a rectifier and filters for the power supply and a DB25 connector for the PC printer port.

Click image for larger version.  Name: CNC_Electronics.jpg  Views: 1024  Size: 608.1 KB  ID: 25277

Looking at recent conversions there seem to be several options but I would like to keep the costs down - at least until I have it up and running.

1) Mach3 and Smoothstepper. The problem here is purely cost - genuine Smoothstepper boards seem to be from £129 to £325. My question here is: Would a Chinese board such as https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/MACH3-4-A...frcectupt=true work in the same way

2) LinuxCNC on a BeagleBoard Black as in https://www.rs-online.com/designspar...machine-part-1 etseq. Again down to cost, will an optoisolator board such as the Optoport V2 perform the same fuunction as Probotix PBX-BB board specified in the above article.

3) Any other pitfalls that you see that I may fall into.

Thanks for any help you can give,

Mike