What Limit Switches?

[Chaz]

No Brainer to me Chaz.? . . . .The IP-A gives abilty to Home To Index so use it because will be superior to most SW and very repeatable.
Also means don't need expensive switches for there repeatabilty/reliabilty. Any decent Mechanical SW will work because all you doing is triggering the point Servo searches for the Index pulse.

Thanks. Ill do some testing on the weekend. Ive not used the Index feature before, so will give it a shot.

[hanermo2]

I am not (yet) homing on servo index w. CSMIO-IP-S-lathe, but ..
based on everything, I expect it to work as well as everything else so far, with some (major) issues sometimes.

I use 1:3 belt drive on the servo spindle.
The CSMIO-IP-S, mach3, lathe, driver cannot understand a transmission, thus will home to next 1:3 limit switch from the encoder.
With "position on spindle" or something similar.
Nothing wrong with it, just makes it impossible to get C axis.

For the time being, fttb,
any overrun is dangerous, potentially really fast (0.05-0.5 secs to crash), so..
For now, I use switches similar to the pics at start of thread.

They look good, are import, and are chinese copies badly made of a somewhat-decent industrial switch from omron (siemens, et al).
My current mechanical switches are not accurate, and don´t repeat well.
Afaik, afai can see, they cannot really fail to "break" on limits, thus they are ok as low-cost limit switches that look good.

My ongoing path will be;..
maintain the mechanical switches, always.
Independent.
They wont catch any crashes, these will come from the servo signals/overload, but usually, I think, with already (some) damage done.
Idea is hw limits prevent system over-run in sw /programming errors.
Both exist.
Imo. Ime.
With Csmio.
With M3.

In very, very, very rare cases it is possible for the cp to move "wrong" - seemingly forever at lowish rate (might be feed, limited feed, just don´t know).
I don´t know why.

Tracking error / load vs commanded path;
Medium-term (3-30 months), I even hope to catch this potential crash-error problem with a tracker system from the servo hw signal in-pos or near-pos.
This means, when running a repeated program, if the load exceeds a given level, or any servo drive has too much (little) load at that point, the program stops.
This would mean perfect "lights-out" running with near zero risk.


Home:
Index from z/ ie encoder, or separate opticals.
Separate opticals are cheap, easy, very very accurate.
Hw optical switches can do 0-1-2 microns, for 20$ or so, plus bits.
But encoder opticals can do 0.4 um, for 0$, and much better reliability.