New setup with SS and G540, total noob,lots of questions

[Lemic]

Hi,
I'm new to all this stuff, CNC, Mach 3, everthing.
I acquired someones project that was setup with Mach3 and drove servos. after finding out servos were not the best fit for my application, I bought stepper motors, a G540, Smooth stepper, and a 48V power supply to retrofit in the machine.

So now I've installed the motors, made cables, (controllers are just mounted to a board till I make a suitable cabinet to house it all), figured out how to make the optical limits work and now I don't know where to land the signals from the limits.

The optical limits are NPN and go from an active low of about a half volt to an active high of 5V when the flag breaks the light beam.

I've attached a sketch of my wiring so far.

Besides not knowing where to land the signal wires from the limits, I have a few other issues.

when starting up Mach, I get a message estop not assigned to smooth stepper. I click the window and click reset on the screen and the message appears again, then I click it again and it goes away. If I hit the Estop, the red fault light goes on  on the G540, but Mach doesn't show that an Estop is active.

The other thing is when I move the X axis .500 inches (according to the screen on Mach) I have only 0.3965 movement of the axis (as read by my test indicator)

any help will be greatly appreciated.

Ray

[BarryB]

For motion, it's should be fairly simple.  You'll need to know the pitch of your ballscrews, but from there, just follow the formula in the manual for mach 3.  I remember when I first did this, and yes, I was lost too.  As soon as I followed along with what was in the manual, it worked perfectly.

Also, mach has great video tutorials on motor tuning.  I believe thats where you are right now.

For the estop, sound like you haven't set the input signal for the estop inside mach.