There has been the talk about how you can't get machines with printer ports and that they don't work well anyway.. Yadda yadda yadda.. Linuxcnc has always had really good printer port performance and allows you to do almost anything with it. (it is just another hardware interface)

So - I grabbed the last emco lathe we had on a shelf for my basement tinker area.. It is the compact 5 cnc version. It has had a life and was the one missing the most parts. (didn't come with steppers and such and maybe a ball screw?) I think we have scrounged enough parts now to create a working lathe.

Here is the twist. Linuxcnc works great using the printer port for step/dir interfaces.. I am not going to do that. The printer port is going to be used to output PWM+Dir and read back the A/B encoder signals.. Linuxcnc will close the loop and it will be a true closed loop setup. (Using PID)