The biggest thing holding me back is that I have no coding background and the data sheet for the chip makes no sense to me. Was hoping someone could point me to an example code so I can have something to start with and tweak. If I start from scratch it’s gonna be less of an uphill battle 
I did try and turn the PWM into analog as you mentioned but the problem is that going from Receiver to analog converter to arduino to stepper driver creates lots of noise and really doesn’t translate into anything usable.