Usually these boards are very cheap and can be purchased in any online shop of the web. The solution consists using a further parallel port inserted in a free pci socket of the motherboard. The necessity of the control of more axes (!!!) can be solved simply adding another pci parallel port to the pc. Normally a stepper motor controller uses quite relatively high voltages (15-80V) therefore any breakage of the controller board, being directly connected to the parallel port of the computer, could cause damages to the mainboard of the personal computer. This means that if we have realized a machine with a left-to-right movement of the axes with a 'HIGH' state of the pin of the port very easily we can change this movement from right-to-left simply inverting the polarity of the relative pin.įor the above mentioned reasons having 12 pins available for output and leaving 2-3 pins to controll external devices (through a relays interface) we can normally control upto 6 axes (it depends by the software) if the enable/disable pins are not used or 4 axis if they are used. Luckily all software used to drive a CNC machine implements functions to invert the polarity of every pin. While the five INPUT pins have their natural use (the emergency stop button and the control of the physical limits of the machine) we have 12 pins available to control automatically all the external devices (the motor of our milling machine, a vacuum pump to clean the surface during the milling process or a water pump to cool the milling head, the speed and even the direction of the spindle etc) and to control the movements of the axes plus all pins necessary to enable/disable the drivers/controllers (even to prevent the overheating of the driver ICs).įor this reason it is really important to decide the use of every single pin accordingly to the CNC machine we are going to realize and accordingly to the software used to realize our manufacts.

This is the list of the usable pins of a parallel port for both the standard connectors: DB25 or Centronics, normally used to connect a printer to our pc. As we can see we have 12 pins available as Output and 5 pins available as Input, to and from the CNC machine.

there aren't particular electronic devices that need to be programmed inside the controller (USB or serial ports usually need a specific programmed microcontroller or specific electronic devices).

a parallel port is (almost) always present in any computer.

Using this port the drivers of the motors of the cnc machine can be controlled very quickly and inexpensively because: The parallel port of our computers is the most common device to control a CNC machine.

Cnc parallel port cnc