Hi everyone,

I was wondering how much interest there might be for an DB25 adapter board that uses the expansion socket on the Duet 2 series board? The aim being the Duet 2 can then control external boards like the popular G540, Leadshine MX controllers and potentially CNC's that use DB25 ports by simply running a parallel cable between it and the existing controller.

The main benefit would be you can get away from your CNC machine being tied to an pc with hardware DB25 port or one of those expensive external ethernet based jobies.

Personally, I have a very large (1.2m x 1.5m) CNC router built around a G540 which would be nice to remotely upload gcode files from my home office where I do my design work and then go down to the machine to do job start/cycle/etc, potentially jogging from a tablet! It would also potentially let me home and remove twist in my Y axis better, which is driven by 2 independent stepper motors.

A lot of machines use the same pinouts for the DB25 connector (in terms of the stepper direction and step pins. The external input/outputs could be configured using the RepRapFirmware 3's pin mapping feature.
What do people think?