Control/breakout boards in parallel on same drivers and steppers

Hi all, please don’t criticise too much my intention; I just want to figure which system fits best to my needs.
So my intention is to put the systems side-by side in the same machine: Marlin, GRBL, EMC - of course not working simultaneously.
What are the connection requirements of various boards to same drivers/steppers in order not to damage or influence each other?
I have a 5 axis cnc breakout board with parallel connection to PC, a GRBL v3 shield and a Micromake printer board with 5 stepper channels.
Please make your explanations as basic as possible as I am only a beginner.

Never done it so I don’t know but I’m thinking you’d use a ramps. You would flash the arduino back and forth between Marlin and grbl to test those. Then you would remove the arduino entirely and run jumpers from the ramps shield to a breakout board connected to emc.

There is a recent thread on this forum about running ramps from linuxcnc, search “cheap linuxcnc solution” or something along those lines.

Rigging up some kind of in place quick switching system seems like a lot of work for just some temporary testing.

I’m interested to know a little more about what and why…?

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I’m kind of curious what you hope to see. I think most of the obvious differences are in the interface.

It is hard to tell mood from text, so I’ll just tell you, I am genuinely interested and this is not the least bit trying to dismiss your idea.

I am working on that same thing. What I plan on doing is building full controllers where I only have to plug in the steppers to the different control boxes. I have to make a series harness that I can use since the boards I have don’t have five drivers. First is LinuxCNC with a breakout board and the CNCshield. It’s all ready to go except that connection, which I might get to tonight since services are cancelled because of snow.

I’m going to do the tinyG and ChiliPeppr for one. That is all ready to go. Just need to get the power adapter easier to swap. Again, needs the serial wiring harness.

The stretch goal is to get my ESP32 setup with GRBL. Still deciding on the driver board. Would have done GRBL on my arduino mega with a shield, but I accidentally fried it.

All these are dreams. The dual endstops aren’t part of this. Probably won’t bother with the endstops at all.

Bart Dring’s MPCNC board is a great breakout for the esp32 and he ported grbl for it. It is a good choice for a grbl controller, although I don’t think it actually does dual endstops.

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Thank you very much for your answers. I highly appreciate them. It’s the reason I consider V1E a very frendly forum.

There are some reasons to try the configuration I have presented.
One is that I want to benefit in any case from printing capacity so Marlin board is a must.
For the others, I must confess that the weakest link of all this mix is the user (my practical knowledge about CNC is almost 0 and I don’t want to give up because of this - I think many of you know that : sudden or gradual decrease of interest because… Learning curves are steep…).
First choice for CNC-ing would be Marlin , as I already have some experience from 3D printing. But, as I also have materials for the other 2 options, is better to implement them from the beginning - just to have escape paths.
Ways to reach the question in the title would be (as some have mentioned):
1 . Plugs from stepper drivers to each board. Safe but doesn’t appeal to me.
2. Relays activated by each board’s power switch. The question here is if there are enough 2 channels: dir+, pul+; maybe 3 adding ena+, the other connections (-) would be directly tied to board’s output?
3. Active electronic components added (like diodes) - I don’t have here the experience how to add them to do their job (how many, where , what configuration).
General question would be also if end-switches simultaneously connected to 3 boards would work OK for each of them (the other 2 remaining unpowered/not used).

I already have all components and I have one (bit old) Intel Atom D525MW board with paralllel output which is quite suited for EMC. Here I want to implement a dual boot OS with Linux/EMC and Windows with the rest of software.