A breakout board is primarily used to make the wiring from your printer port to the controller cards easier and neater. Rather than use a cable and cut of the plug on the end so you can direct wires to the individual boards it plugs directly into the breakout board which has screw type terminals dedicted for the controller boards. Some breakout boards also have optoisolators incorporated into their design to protect the computer from voltage spikes (I think the correct term is influx voltage?). The wiring for the step and direction signals and encoder feedback are then run from the breakout board to the controler cards and the power supply wires are run from the power supply to the controler cards which regulates the voltage to the wiring which runs to the motors. You can also use a mother board to link the controller cards. The breakout board or mother board are essentially methods of making the wiring of the system easier, more or less plug and play. |