New build with recycled parts on a ridiculous budget 120cm*60cm work area

[Neale]

Plenty of people use microswitches, and that will probably be fine. I use inductive sensors, as much as anything for convenience in mounting, but in practice I doubt that you will have any issues. The other point is that once you start wiring inductive sensors in series to share a single BOB input, you need to make sure that you have enough volts to drive them as there is a bit lost in each sensor in the chain. I'm putting this crudely and hoping that the experts will let me off this time!

Do you have a pointer to any documentation on the BOB? My guess is that it will work fine with just a 5V feed. However, I doubt that the inputs have pull-up resistors as they are probably opto-isolated and pull-ups are a little bit trickier in that case. It's not like the Arduino where you connect directly to the input pins on the CPU chip. On the plus side, it's a bit more difficult to blow up a BOB than an Arduino! I strongly suspect that if you connect the switches (just one, or a number of them in series) between +5V and the BOB input, it will work fine, but I wouldn't guarantee that without looking at the documentation for the BOB, or even a sample "this is how you wire it" diagram.