Hi,
soft limits are in machine co-ordinates, if you dont' reference to a known point then the machine has no idea where the
boundaries are.
When you are setting up soft limits and confirming/testing them make sure your DROs are displaying machine co-ordinates.
You say that you are homing to the extreme left. Your X travel then should range from 0 (left) to 30' (right).
As a confirmation, home to the extreme left and carefully manual jog to the right. The machine co-ordinates should increase,
ie positive. If so your X axis soft limits would be 0 and +30'.
Follow the same procedure with the Y axis. If it is homed with the table closest to the front of the machine, then when you manually
jog in the direction of the extent of travel the Y co-ordinate will be negative. Your soft limits would be 0 and -30. If the table
homes furtherest away from the front of the machine jogging into the travel area the Y co-ordinates would be positive
and your soft limits would be 0 and 30'.
Commonly the Z axis is homed to the top of travel. In that case all your machining will be done with negative Z machine co-ordinates.
Your soft limits would be 0 (top) and -10 (extreme lowest) say. This may seem a bit backwards but it is by far the most common setup,
if you ever have the chance to fiddle with a Hass mill, thats how they do it. When your actually machining something you will be using
work co-ordinates with zero commonly the top of the material to be machined. If you want to skim the surface you would drive Z down
50 thou say ie Z=-0.05 and machine away from there.
Craig