Hi all
Its been a long while since I posted, Hope you are all well, not sure how many old friends still around, hope to make some new :D


Ive still got the big "gate" mill, Love it, use it reasonably often, In order to aid its UX ive added some manual wind handles to the X&Y which help on some operations. ( I hear you snear)

For example... I may use the handles to wind the machine to my start point, or to a center,
or, if im just doing a quick slot.... i may just do it manually using the handles..

For the interest of clarity, the machine runs two servos for the table

https://www.vevor.co.uk/ac-servo-mot...p_010200832854

same as above, just 1kw flavour.

I run a normal stepper and stepper driver on the Quill

The servo controllers are then wired via a ethernet smooth stepper to Mach3 in a pretty vanilla setup, Dean helped me with many years ago.


Anyway, in order to use the handles, up until now, ive just turned the electric to the controller and therefore servo controllers off... as when the machine is on, obviously the servos hold position and im unable to wind the handles..

Ive got two questions,

Firstly, how would i go about adding a switch, which would disable the "hold" on the servo... (So i could wind the handle on the axis)
(Id potentially like to flick the switch, wind the axis to say a start position, then flick the switch to give back control to the servo)
** this would also be useful, to be used as a lock if I was manually machining for example

The way they are wired at the moment, I believe is called half loop, in that the encoder feeds back to the controller, but not all the way back to mach3.

Im considering buying a DRO for the machine, again, for my semi manual operations, but I did wonder if there was any way of getting the servo encoders to feedback to mach3... or maybe even just ad seperate encoders?


thanks in advance for any help or thoughts on this subject.