Centroid Community CNC Support Forum

Alright, I see the e stop is a hot debate! Ill keep that in mind. I generally only use estop in e situations. Not as a switch. Not too worried about having to rehome after an emergency stop.

For today's question, should I be following that diagram to the tee? Including moving my existing connections on the acorn to the db25 breakout board? Or should I just use the db25 for the stepper drives?

I run 5v straight from the power supply to the pul dir +. pul dir - to the db25. All inputs straight to the acorn board. It may not be the only way, but it works. Also skip the enable lines until after it's running. Add in enable or fault lines as you wish after it's moving.

Hey there! The way the machine was wired from the factory, the e stop turns off the main power supply to the machine, will this be a problem with the acorn?

Yes it is. A line voltage estop is an electrical hack that while it can serve the required purpose, are most often used on featureless controllers to save money. This is one of the reasons that after doing dozens of Asian frame control retrofits, I have learned to simply "replace everything tht has a wire attached to it". You may choose to keep some of the components, but if you do, please rewire as per US convention, especially in the grounding.

Alright, I see the e stop is a hot debate!

Not much of a debate. Those looking to save time or money will consider it as viable. Those with experience and knowledge of CNC control systems will not.

Right on, I appreciate all the advice and information!
At the current time I cant afford to replace all components, but at some point I would like to go to servos. As for now, is there a recommendation for wiring the switch to only kill the motion components and not the board? My first thought is to power the acorn separately and use another power supply for the drivers 5v. This is obviously not the best way, but I dont feel good about cutting voltage unexpectedly to the acorn.

E-Stop should disconnect spindle and all drives, not Acorn IMHO.

And Acorn must be set up to force rehome after E-Stop.

Uwe

Ok, its alive! sort of. i wired everything up, opened cnc12 hit cycle start and i was able to jog the machine around. That was very exciting, thanks for all the help so far!
After that i went to test the limit switches, they are omron TL-o5mc1.
no response, so i lookd at the manual, and videos. opened the wizard, followed along with the videos (i thought) set the inputs and outputs, setup the home switches, configured the machine and reset the pc and the acorn. Powered up and now i have to ability to jog, the limit switches still dont respond to metal being placed in front of them. not sure whats going on.

I've added more pictures to the drive folder, and I've attached another report. Thanks in advance.

If you just use a 9v battery on the blue and brown wires, you should see the light on the sensor change as you pass metal in front of it.

Switches must be NPN. They can be normally open or normally closed although normally closed is the safest. It looks like yours are npn normally open and that should function. Blue to Ground... Brown to 24v dc and black to the acorn input.
When wired correctly, you will see the lights by where the wires go into the acorn board change state, when you test them.

You have input 1 set to "home all" and input 2 set to "home limit all". Pick one or the other but not both. Home limit all works best and it's simple. Then you can set up the travel limits in the wizard.

Are your limit switches wired in series? I assume you have 3 of them? One on each axis at the HOME position at the front left of the table.

As Ken stated you need to get each switch responding first before you can series them to a single input. You can wire each one to its own input but that will waste valuable inputs.

anbody have a good layout for a control panel on a machine like this?