What does an indexer do?

I got some stepper drives from work and the literature says they have built in indexers. I tried looking it up and what I could come up with is they generate step and direction code. The only thing I could think that would come in handy for is to jog the motor. If the drive creates its own step and direction, you could just run one or two wires to the drive (plus power supply) and be able to jog it back and forth. Am I way off?

Try posting a picture of what you have? Name ? you have to give us something... 4,6,8 wires motors???

An Indexer is basically a machine control. But rather than reading a g-code file, they often accept commands from another program. Sometimes they can contain custom programs internally.

The drive is a ims im1007i. Here is the literature http://servosystems.com/ims_micro_im1007i_ie.pdf . Ger21 if you didn't answer my questions, I think I would've forgot about this forum a long time ago. You are very helpful and informative and I wish you and yours a merry Christmas.

What you have is some call a hybrid driver. It use a stepper motor with encoder on the back side for position like a servo motor drive does.