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Hey there all,
Curious if anyone else is seeing their limit switches dying on a fairly regular basis? I am seeing my x and y1 limit switches die after like two or three homings/runs… and this is a fairly regular occurrence — so much so I will keep an extra one or two on hand.
It seems that they are just very fragile or that after a few touches they die. I’ve now had two different controllers and the problem has persisted over both controllers. I do Test in the machine inspector… and it goes from showing green with barely a touch, to only if the plunger is moved a certain way to it not working at all.
I’m curious if anyone has swapped them out for better ones? Or if anyone has any ideas on why they may be dying?
I think I have seen other machines use proximity sensors?
I almost always just set work x,y and go from there, but would love to be able to set a machine x,y 0 which would help for fixture use/setup.
In Machine Inspector at the very bottom are the cnc machine’s grbl settings.
there is one for the seek speed, slowing this down will make the machine take longer to home, BUT will also slow down the initial impact to the switch and may correct the issue of breaking it…
So you cna change $25 setting from the default of 750mm/min to a slower setting, maybe 250mm/min will work to prolong the life of those switches.
To make this setting change, up at the top in the “console” section send this command:
$25=250
and then you can refresh the grbl settings at the bottom to verify this change saved, then you can try homing and it will be 1/3 of the prior speed for the initial movement to the switch, which is hopefully enough to make the crash into it not so aggressive.
The Prox switches would be nice, but they are usually a larger device size which would take some modifying of the XCP frame to make fit…
In the standard X Carve configuration they are only homing switches. That said they are vulnerable to over travel crashes during carves or jogging.
Only the Z switch had a physical stop to prevent damage (if set up correctly).
I learned this info from the forum prior to my purchase. When assembling my machine I made physical stops for X and Y that stopped travel just beyond switch activation. Just shy of 6 years in use now with the original switches.
Something you should look at.
That is a great suggestion. I just wish they were better / more durable / not as easy to kill.
I like the physical stops and the slowing the homing doing, which was also suggested, but I think ultimately I wanna try to replace them with a solution that just works better. Not sure 100% what that is yet, but ya… that’s what I want lol
I killed an endstop by catching it on my shirt and breaking off the tip. Other than that no issues here. My pro has beefy solid stop collars on the X and Y ballscrews does yours not have them?
Here’s a video I made when I replaced the X1 limit switch if you’re interested in seeing if yours are different. I Broke My X-Carve Pro... - YouTube
Not at my shop, but pretty sure the stop collars are there, but I’ve replaced that Y1 no less than 4 times since I’ve had the machine… the last time I was at inventables they gave me 2 or 3 spares just in case lol.
I am not 100% sure on why mine continually has had issues… I’ve been babying the s* out of it though since my last replacement and it’s going ok so far but hard to tell since my controller was replaced recently too… soooo it could have been my controller that was the problem.
My thought was that I would like to replacement them with proximity ones or just beefier limit switches just to never have to worry about it again. But haven’t seen that mod yet on an xcp. The little rectangle that it sticks through isnt very big and the plate, the one you take off to replace, doesn’t allow for much depth either.
At any rate, I was hopeful that someone paved that path of that mod already lol
//g