Centroid Community CNC Support Forum

Hi Guys
I have just completed retrofitting a 3 axis mill successfully, but now I wish to add 2 more axes - A & B (tilting rotary table). I am using the Centroid software and the MPU11 & GPIO4 boards, I also have an Optic board for these additional axis, but my question is......On start up of the machine I would like to be able to choose which (if any) of the rotary axis are fitted to the machine and require homing. IE. Start machine, press Aux key 4 and this indicates that only A axis is fitted and required homing and initialising, press cycle start to home all 4 axis. OR Start machine, press Aux key 4 and Aux key 5 this will indicate that both A & B axis are fitted and all 5 axis require homing & initialising. If neither aux key 4 or aux key 5 are pressed it only requires the 3 axis to be homed and ititialised.
My first question is, is this possible? if so how?
Or is there a smarter way of doing what I want to achieve (not having to home axis 4 and 5 if they are not fitted to the table)?

Regards
Andrew

Do you plan to unplug or disconnect the rotary axes when they are removed from the machine? If so, then you will need to change their axis labels to 'N' on the Machine Configuration -> Motor Parameters table. Otherwise you will get faults due to the open encoder connections.

If you disable the axes on the Machine Configuration screen then you could use IF/THEN/GOTO logic in your cncm.hom file to skip around the sections which home the A and B axes. Use variables #20104 and #20105 to retrieve the fourth and fifth axis labels. These variables hold ASCII values: 'A' is 65, 'B' is 66.

For example: If you do not plan to unplug or disconnect the rotary axes, then it is not strictly necessary to disable them on the Machine Configuration screen. If you do disable them anyway, then you can use the logic above. If you leave them enabled, then you will have to set home for each axis, but you could use your suggested Aux key selections to skip the move-to-switch sequences. For example, if you use Aux4 LED On to indicate that the A axis is to be used, and Aux5 LED On to indicate that the B axis is to be used, then you could use logic like this in your cncm.hom file:
In order to make the Aux keys turn their own LEDs on and off, you would need to add a few lines to your PLC program. For example:
You would add those lines to your PLC program source file, then re-compile.

Hi
Thanks very much for the help.
Yes, I was actually going to unplug the rotary axis, but I will ponder this one overnight as I probably don't need to - the rotary axis unit is approx 300Kg.
Is it possible to disable the axis through a Aux key press??

Regards
Andrew