Dear Forum Readers,
Has anyone else experienced something similar
I have been using Mach 3 for about a year for prototyping work on a 1 meter x 1.5 meter 3 axis router system, without major problems.
Two recent events are suspicious and potentially dangerous; Mach 3 passed one of its soft limits during machining and the axis motion was stopped by the hardware limit switch in place. These two scary events were started in a regular manner, no warning of Mach 3 telling me that the job goes beyond a soft limit, for example.
On the second such event I could verify that the machine coordinate system of two axis had shifted by some amount, 170 mm for one axis, some 23 mm for the second.
I extracted these two numbers by jogging the "crashed" axis off of the limit and gently jogging to each of the home switches until they trip. The values indicated by the DROs in this situation should be identical than the values after a homing procedure, zero in my case. A clear shift in machine coordinate was present. Scary and disappointing.
The configuration of this basic 3 axis open loop system:
X, stepper, no encoder, home switch on its own pin, limits in series on pin 15
A is slave of Y, steppers, no encoders, Y home switch on its own pin, Y limits in series on pin 15
Z, stepper, no encoder, home switch on its own pin, Z limits in series on pin 15
in short: 3 pins for homing, one for limits, and one for e-stop.
The working volume defined by the soft limits is smaller and lies inside the volume defined by the hardware limits.
Any comment you may provide will be appreciated.
enjoy your WE, Philippe