First of all:
Hi, I'm new here!

I currently have a small DIY CNC mill running GRBL and DRV8825 stepper drivers, but I'm looking to upgrade to LinuxCNC.

At my university we have an electronics waste bin, and I was lucky enough to find two Mesa 5i20's in there. Unfortunately I don't own a computer with PCI ports, so I have no way to test them at the moment. I have some questions about it:

I see a lot of people using a 5i25 with daughter board. Am I right in assuming that the daughter board is only there to provide extra i/o?
Since the 5i20 has much more i/o, can I just use it without any extra hardware?

Like this: PC => 5i20 => DRV8825 => Stepper motors

And what about the spindle: It has a PWM input and an encoder output to measure the RPM. Can this be connected directly to the 5i20 (maybe with a transistor for level-shifting the PWM signal)?

Thanks!

EDIT: The 'similar threads' already answered my questions, weird that they didn't show up when I performed a search. Anyway, how do I delete this thread?

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