If you were to use an Ethernet SmoothStepper (ESS) you could have up to 51 inputs and outputs, with a maximum of 31 inputs. If however you use a second parallel port card now you could have one pin for each home switch, one pin for each limit switch,Ī total of 9 input pins and still have inputs to spare. Limits and home switches to one pin then Mach loses the ability to distinguish between a limit event or a home event and cant My concern is that when you link all your
#GECKODRIVE G540 FREE#
Many people do it just exactly to free up another input for some other purpose. I'm a lone voice against this practice however. I have always argued against linking all the switches to one, or a few pins. Would you all recommend putting multiple switches on one pin? It seems very simple but I know I may be missing something. That would free up an extra pin, and then (with two pins) I could have up to four states, which would be fine. In response to joeaverage, are you saying I could just plug in another PCIE parallel card, plug in a breakout board, and use that for a ton more inputs? I know I'd still need to process the input (it'll probably just be binary to decimal), and I was planning to use Brains, but other than that is the config as simple as defining the new inputs appropriately in Mach3? In that case, this seems like it'd give us a ton more input options.Īnother thing though, I just saw something online about how you can put multiple limit switches on one pin. Do you mean that I could get a separate controller (I assume those boards replace a smoothstepper or something similar) and use the controller's pins? I assume I'd need some kind of breakout board to make use of the extra inputs safely. In response to ger21, that seems like a good idea. Since you said you can't PWM the limit switch pin on the G540, I think that means this isn't possible with only one pin. All the voltage analysis is done on the microcontroller, so the problem is just how we communicate those three different states from the microcontroller to Mach3.
If the voltage is in the middle, the sinker just sits stationary. If the capacitor voltage drops too low, the controller tells Mach3 to reverse feed to avoid shorting out, and if it goes too high, it tells it to feed normally. In response to Tweakie's ask for more detail, we're running a sinker EDM machine with a microcontroller that acts as a voltage sensor. Wow, I'm amazed at the amount of support here.