Alternate control board

Having just had my final exams and with three months to go until university starts, I'm looking into building a budget 3D printer over the summer.
While looking for affordable electronics I stumbled upon this ebay auction: [cgi.ebay.com]

4 Nema 17's and one 4-axis driver board. It seems like a pretty good deal to me but there might be a catch. Could anyone enlighten me on whether this might be suitable for what I want to do?

I want to use three motors for driving the axes (obviously). My axes will be a variation on the Makerbot's and as these motors seem as good or better than theirs, they should be good, right?
I want to use the final motor to drive the extruder. I think there's a Nema 17 extruder design out there so I should be set if the motor is indeed strong enough.

On to the driver board: 12V input, control over the parallel port and microstepping up to 1/16th. It has support for limit switches but I don't think I need those.
Interestingly, it also has the option to power a spindle and control its speed. I'm wondering if this can be adopted to power the extruder heater? This would make the board an all-in-one solution, you'd only need hack together something to read out the extruder's temperature and with the addition of an old PC you'd have everything you need for your printing as far as the electronics go, right?

Of course, the electronics being from China poses risks and challenges, but I'm willing to tackle those. I found this specification page and thanks to google translate I can get an idea of what it says: [hyu68.com]

Is this electronics package a good deal or would I be wasting my money?

[reprap.org]
and
[reprap.org]
may handle it. There's also bothacker's emc-reprap stuff. I don't know where that is hiding yet.

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-Sebastien, RepRap.org library gnome.

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Remember, you're all RepRap developers (once you've joined the super-secret developer mailing list), and the wiki, RepRap.org, [reprap.org] is for everyone and everything!

cnczone.com has some documentation of peoples experience with chinese control boards. I believe it is a toshiba tb6560 or such on that board you linked to. the nice thing is that although the chinese board will probably not hit full specs, (read more on cnczone) it will run at reprap specs most likely just fine.

I am currently doing this ( toshiba tb6560 chinese 4 channel stepper board + Arduino Mega), and the only issues I'm hitting are:
* don't exceed 20-25volts-ish despite the board saying it's rated to 36, it's not! it's known to regularly die at 30ish with smoke! I've been running at 12 or 18v and both seem OK so far.
* Documentation on the pinout of the DB25 ( normally for the parallel port, but connected to the arduino ) on the board is normally wrong, or at least some of it is. A careful googling and/or trial-and error will resolve this for you.
* I'm getting some noise in my steppers at present that is still unresolved, probably my wiring.

Buzz

> * Documentation on the pinout of the DB25 (
> normally for the parallel port, but connected to
> the arduino ) on the board is normally wrong, or
> at least some of it is. A careful googling and/or
> trial-and error will resolve this for you.

Posting the pinout might save some of us hours of "trial&error" trying to locate proper pins ... I'm still unable to find the proper pins for X (Y and Z seems to work fine, the fourth one I have not tried yet)