Anyone looking at CS3E-D1008 drivers from Leadshine?

I haven't gotten around to installing them yet on the CNC but so far they seem to be working great in my testsetup. They really are a substitute for servos if you don't need to go very high in RPM (2Krpm is a realistic limit for these steppers although I was able to push them up to 3Krpm).

As for cabling: it's massively easier to connect than the mesa cards and I would definitely recommend going for the closed loop steppers. You only need 1 ethernet cable to the first drive and connect the drives together in series using a small ethernet cable.

The drives have some in- and output you can use eliminating the need for the GPIO's on the mesa cards. It's indeed possible to have the drives perform the homing autonomously, but I prefer to forward all in- and outputs to linuxcnc so you have control there. But that's just my preference and does have the drawback of having slightly less accurate homing position. I have a testsetup here with 3 drives/motors/inductive switches and connecting the inductive switch for homing really is just connecting it to input 4 of the drive and reading the IO's over ethercat.

They only drawback to these drives is the quality of the configuration software. It only runs on windows, so reconfiguring the drive requires a windows machine (or a vm) and it has quite a few bugs and untranslated chinese stuff. Software also states is an "alpha release for internal use only". I've contacted leadshine about this and they promised an update last month but haven't received anything yet. But on the other hand, once you configured the drive you do not need the software anymore. Not a showstopper though...

But bottomline: If I had to choose between a setup with the JMC's and the closed loop steppers I tested -> I would without a doubt go for the closed loop steppers.
Mesa has great hardware and I've been using them for years, but the ethercat drives are just sooo much easier to work with.

Very interesting thanks for the lenghy answer.

My first idea was to get the JMC servos because are cheap and having the integrated drive would result in a smaller control box that I really appreciate, but now discovering about Ethercat the wiring is much simpler and my Omron VFD for the spindle I believe has a Ethercat option module so that's interesting.

Also for my small mill build I don't need crazy speed on the axis but I am looking for accuracy, so after doing some research is not clear to me yet who wins, the servos need tuning and steppers are easier to work with and don't need a brake for Z axis.

In the Marco reps video that he talks about the JMC servos he says that likes them more than the leadshine closed loop steppers, but if speed and torque at higher rpms are not as important I would like to see his opinion then.

So I think in the end considering cost the JMC and mesa route is less money but more work, so we will see..