Can someone please clear up a few questions I have dealing with wiring and configuring the Limit switches? Hi, I'm new to this stuff in all ways possible. I'm usually pretty good on this sort of thing but find myself confused right at the beginning. I'm converting a Fryer bed mill from an Anilam control to Mach 3. I have a Galil DMC-4040 Accelera controller. I'm currently trying to hook everything up. I am trying to reuse as much as possible and while more bells and whistles are nice and some are very possibly future additions, I only right now need a pretty basic setup. It’s a three axis bed mill with all three axis's having identical servos, amps, encoders, and limit switches. I have everything mounted and now have to wire the limits. Galil allows the power for the switches to come from either the controller itself or from an external source. The question is why is it suggested to use an external source? It seems to be just another thing that can go bad. I have a power supply handy and can mount and wire it but why should I? It seems greatly simplified just to use the onboard Galil +5v. Currently I have only one limit switch per axis, the forward (+) limit. There is a box to check for configuring of the Galil Plugin for Mach 3 that allows using the Limits for Homes. So the second dumb question is which Limit switch does it choose for the home? I think I can assume it’ll choose the forward (+) switch as that is probably convention but I would like to confirm that as I don’t have reverse (-) Limit switches. This leads me to another question…if I don’t have a reverse (-) Limit switch what do I do? The switches are normally closed so if it thinks I have a reverse Limit switch it would think it’s tripped and fault, right? Do I just jump the RLSx to the ground or is there a way to tell Galil and Mach 3 there isn’t a switch in the first place? My final question of the day involves what might be just wiring vs. configuring. For wiring I was going to wire the pos (+) wire from whichever source to the LSCOM (#6), the ground likewise from whatever source to one end of the switch, and finally the other end of the switch to FLSx(#36,37,38,39). But in the manual All use port #1: X +limit = pin #1, Y +limit = pin #2, and Z +limit = pin #3. What is this about? I’m still in the wiring stage and it may just be a configuring (ie later) step.
Thanks to anyone that can shed some light on any or some or all of these questions.