5 axis milling machine with 7i96s

Hi Everyone, 

I am new here and new to CNC, Linux and Mesa boards, so pls excuse the novice questions.

This is my setup
I have a 5-axis milling machine, which uses 2 stepper motors for the z axis, so in total there are 6 stepper motors. I have also bought a servo motor ECMA-C21020RS from Delta to power my spindle. I have a Mesa 7i96s card

Now for my question
Have I bought the wrong Mesa card for my requirement? From my understanding, the 7i96s can only control 5 motors so my 6 steppers and servo exceed the capacity. If so, what would be the best solution? To buy another card and scrap the 7i96 or is there an option to buy an add-on card to work with the 7i96s?

Thank you in advance for your help

I wanted to add that my machine also has a parallel port available, if that would help

You can add a daughter card to the 7I96S parallel expansion port.

You could  use a Mesa daughterboard (a 7I85S  or 7I78 would  add 4 step/dir axis).
You could also use an inexpensive parallel port breakout, like the common Sainsmart 
5 Axis breakout, either ST-V2 or ST-V3 or one of the many  similar parallel port
breakouts. 

As PC's said,

Your 7i96s is perfectly capable of driving at least 10 axis.

The process is
Use mesaflash to upload the 7i96 5bob firmware. That will allow you to use the additional axis.

I've done this with 2 separate installs and no issues.

Thank you so much PCW and Jimmy, I will do more research into the options you have both suggested and see which would be easier for me to implement.

Hi PCW,

I found a card locally that seems similar to the Sainsmart breakout you had mentioned. I'll add the link below. It says its for Mach3 and LinuxCnc, would this work with my Mesa 7i96s. Thanks so much for your help. Interface Board CNC 5 Axis

Gautham wrote:

Hi PCW,

I found a card locally that seems similar to the Sainsmart breakout you had mentioned. I'll add the link below. It says its for Mach3 and LinuxCnc, would this work with my Mesa 7i96s. Thanks so much for your help. Interface Board CNC 5 Axis
 

Yes, that looks exactly like a Sainsmart ST-V2 so 7i96s_5abobd.bin firmware
will work with that.

Thank you so much PCW

Hi again,So I finally got this BoB,  and I have wired up everything according to this video tutorial I found, but I don't know how to configure my B-axis to run through the BoB on LinuxCNC. I also managed to flash the 7i96s_5abobd.bin firmware to the mesa card but I'm not sure how to proceed on LinuxCNC
Thank you so much for your help.

I would probably use pncconfs discovery option so pncconf knows about the
additional stepgens so you can configure the B axis.