Hello,
I’ve had MPCNC for sometime, and biggest issue I’ve had with it was not being simple to maintain (and verify) square. I’ve had some luck with hard endstops that would cause both steppers to skip steps at set position, and than manually set 0. But that seems like a bad idea as I’m currently rebuilding machine with stronger motors and 15mm belts. I’m trying to find solution to adding dual endstops into mpcnc for x and y axis, so I can finally use my machine as intended, instead of spending majority of time squaring axis.
I’m using estlcam firmware on both PC and arduino (arduino mega+ramps 1.4) and I don’t want to change firmware to marlin. Is there a way to enable dual endstops in estlcam? If it’s not possible at the moment, can I somehow find estlcam source code to modify it myself? Or can I suggest somewhere for that feature to get enabled?
Thanks a lot, Nikola
Hey Nikola, the only way to add dual endstops currently is to buy an OpenCNCShield2 or OpenCNCShield2 Mini. They work with a dedicated ESP32 doing the squaring work before even firing up Estlcam. It’s not a perfect solution, but it works pretty well.
Christian did say that he might add dedicated Estlcam hardware later on that could do Autosquaring, but that’s gotta take a while and will also first only be available in Germany.
Hi, thanks for replaying
I actually spent some time thinking and I managed to find a way to hack homing into autosquare. Basically switches are wired with COM and NC to stepper driver PUL, and basically when motor hits switch it gets disconnected. Other motor keeps moving till it hits it’s own endstop. I’m working on a small mod with 7402 IC to detect when both are pressed to send a signal to microcontroller. Only downside would be it would need seperate drivers for each motor. It should work with all PCB’s (grbl,ramps, and others) and all firmwares that have any type of homing that includes endstops. I might actually make a PDF tutorial for that, as I think it might be usefull to a lot of people.
Nikola
That sounds very interesting. I would certainly like to try something like that.
I actually managed to assemble a prototype PCB that works. Just need to make some more tests to see how it holds up. It basically works by using COM and NC to cut out stepper driver signal when switch is pressed, and when both switches are pressed it gives out output HIGH to Ramps to indicate that endstops are pressed, and it restores back stepper drivers to be able to back away from endstops.