Apparently setting Home to the front left of the machine using the inductive limit switches is proving to be more difficult than it should. Is there a video available that use version 1.5.3? I’ve followed the online instructions and have gone through them several times and am still having troubles. As far as I can tell the limit switches are functioning properly. They trigger when they are supposed to.
My problem is apparently not understanding the way the home button should be working. I’m under the assumption that you click on the home button and it should travel to the machine origin based on what corner you set it up in the firmware. When I click the button all I get Alarm 8 with this message in the console, “ALARM:8 (Homing fail. Pull off travel failed to clear limit switch. Try increasing pull-off setting or check wiring.). This alarm happens even if none of the axis are even close to the trigger switch.
You didn’t say what machine you have. It sounds like maybe you’re confusing the Home button with the XY (Work offset) button.
The Home button tells the machine to move in the Z, then X and Y towards the machine home, the limit switches. You do that when you boot up the machine or any time you reboot it.
The work offsets are the coordinates in X,Y and Z where you want to place your material to match the start point in your file. These are commonly G54 - G59. They can be found in the upper right corner of the visualizer.
The Gxx number displayed is the active home (work offset) number. If you click the XY button to the right of the Home button it will take you to those coordinates. You can set multiple work offsets for jigs reference points that you use repeatedly. For instance, I frequently set G54 to the left front corner reference point. Halfway across the machine I have another set of stops that form a reference point. I set that position to G55. G56 takes me to my vacuum table home (work offset) position. I have G59 set to the same coordinates as G54 in the event that I absentmindedly reset that point.
So, in summary, the Home button tells the router to seek the limit switches. That’s how it knows where it is in space while you’re using it. The XY button takes you to the active work offset and can be changed at any time.
This makes perfect sense and that is what I expect to happen. However, it keeps throwing an alarm 8 whenever I hit the home button no matter what actual position xyz are in, even right after startup or a reboot. I guess I’ll start from scratch and go through all the settings again just in case I missed something. I just wish the setup guide was using Gsender 1.5 just so I was sure nothing is different between the versions.
There is a setting called the Pull off travel which sets the distance the axis moves after triggering the limit switch. If it does not move far enough away (due to the setting) it will trigger the alarm.
I’ve tried this and just tried again using an exaggerated value of 5mm. The z axis moves down 5mm but then throws the alarm. This happens whether or not the switch is activated or not. So the z axis can be halfway to the surface and it still triggers. I should also mention that it occasionally throws a notification of “Invalid Line. The following line caused an error 1: ‘N/A’, Press start to resume the job.” but I don’t even have a job loaded.
Is the homing attempting to home in the correct directions? You may need to invert the directions to home against limit switches that aren’t at the back right of the machine. Also helpful for debugging is to temporarily disable “require home on boot” or something similar as well as “home axes independently”, then you can diagnose one axis at a time and finally put them all together. Agreed that this aspect of setup isn’t smooth.
Thank you for your suggestions. After a late night last night I think I got the homing fixed. I ended up starting from scratch and using a configuration file from a user that replied on a different thread. I haven’t checked it out today but the last part that was giving issue was parking. I’m not too worried about that part at the moment.