Got my gantry together and started to move it around. I tried to push the stop switches to see if the work while it was traveling and nothing happened. I can see the lights come on and off on the jackpot when I press the switches down. Could use some help to get them to stop the machine. Are they not meant to work when just moving them around? I thought they would work whenever they get pushed.
The stops only work while homing as the default behavior.
It is possible to configure them to work as hard limits, but this is generally not recommended. It’s possible you could accidentally trigger them when traveling near the limits of the machine if it is not setup correctly.
It’s far easier just to make sure to do a little pre-job setup to make sure you stay within the limits of your workspace.
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Thanks for the quick response I appreciate it. How come it doesn’t operate with hard stops on all directions so one doesn’t accidently hit the ends, especially being a nubby. That knows very little about cnc ?
To be honest, as a newbie, I feel like hard stops add a further complication that is bound to frustrate you.
Letting the machine hit the end a skip steps gives you an audible indication of when and where you when wrong, is a better learning experience.
With or without hard stops, if you don’t want to ruin your piece, you have to learn to do proper setup.
Do this with cheap foam, etc if you need, but it really is important to get right ahead of time.
Once you do this, the hard stops will never get used anyway.
copy that thanks appreciate the guidance
And in case you aren’t aware hitting the end of travel sounds bad, like gears stripping, but it doesn’t harm the stepper motor at all.
The endstop situation is a bit of a mess given how most of us hobbyists use our machines. As other have indicated, it is easier to just have the hard and soft stops turned off. And as Dreyfus indicated, having the stepper hit the limit of our machines is non-destructive. The noise when the steppers are stoipped sounds like the machine is grinding up the belts, but that is just an artifact of how the stepper motor works.
As for the mess (I’m basing this on Marlin, but is likely also true for FluidNC), most of the time we will exceed our limits on the max of our machine, and there are no switches on that end. The max can be handled by soft limits. It is easy to enable soft limits in the firmware, but that only works if the machine is homed so it knows where the router is physically. The problem is that most of us handle our routing jobs in relation to the stock. We move our router to the corner of our stock and use a G92 to set the machine origin to that position. When we do, the machine is no longer homed, and therefore the machine no longer knows the router position. In this state, soft stops are disabled, so they don’t do us any good for real work.
Using workspaces is the “right” way to both work with our jobs relatively while preserving the homed state of the machine, but using workspaces adds a level of complexity to the jobs that doesn’t make sense for most hobbyists.