So I thought I was pretty proud of myself for building a PIC based stepper driver. There was a small defect in the final board layout that required me to solder a couple resistors to the back side instead of through the top like all the rest of the components, however, in testing the board with a 555 based step generator, it worked!
That is, until I tried using the signals from the parallel port. Since electrical engineering is not my profession, I'm not 100% sure why the signals didn't work, but my guess is the 3V from the parallel port was not strong enough for the PIC to register the logic Highs. So I had to some transistors to convert the 3V inputs to 5V for the PIC.
The problem was the boards were already etched and soldered. Building new boards from scratch when I only needed the 2 boards I had started did not excite me. So I utilized a tried and true method of "Dead Bug Construction" to add the 4 resistors and 2 transistors to each board. The results, while not pretty, do work.
