The standard Arduino library includes a stepper motor control library. The external AccelStepper library adds the capability for acceleration and deceleration curves. I thought that would be important for driving industrial equipment as the large pieces of metal impart far more momentum than what I'm familiar with in a 3D printer.

As it turns out, I was worrying about the wrong thing. I connected my bargain oscilloscope to the output pins of my (knockoff) Arduino Nano and watched the pulses go by as I issue different commands to AccelStepper. As I issued commands for faster and faster speeds, I could see those pulses come closer and closer together until they were almost but not quite 0.2 ms apart. Running a test program in a tight loop, an Arduino running AccelStepper is indeed failing to reach 5 kHz pulse speed.

A little web search indicated this is roughly comparable to what others are saying online. AccelStepper is good for roughly 3-4 kHz and things get dicey beyond that. For the ZETA4 controller, configured to 25,000 microsteps per revolution, this is simply not fast enough to get decent speed out of the box.

How does this happen? Further web search indicated this is because all the timing for AccelStepper is done in software. Perhaps for the goal of leaving the very precious hardware timer resources for other user programs? That's merely speculation of the design decisions involved. But one thing is certain - AccelStepper limits meant it is not sufficient for generating high frequency pulses required to drive this particular salvaged XY motion control table. I'll have to look at something more specific for motion control, possibly a 3D printer control board.