In this paper a laboratory stand is presented that was developed for a multi-axis machine stepper drive control system. Each stepper drive utilizes an EtherCAT communication module based on a development board with software developed by the authors. The modules are used to exchange process data with a higher level controller. The EtherCAT communication standard is described including it’s utilization for stepper drive control. A functional description of the developed communication module is also presented. The aim of the Laboratory stand is to conduct research of cyclic communication (1 milisecond or less) and synchronization between multiple drive slave devices and a supervisory controller. The main focus of the presented results was to determine EtherCAT communication cycle jitter on the developed modules. The main aim of the research was to verify whether the data exchange via EtherCAT bus has an impact on the synchronous operation of the multi-axis system.