Hello
I made a laser system for myself. I am using MKS DLC32 ver2.1 and lightburn. I wanted to work with limit switches on the machine. But I constantly got the alarm1 error and I guess I won’t be able to proceed with the physical limit switch. I also wanted to try the soft limit system. But I have a serious problem here. I don’t know how to teach the machine the soft limit limits. and I couldn’t find a source that explains it step by step. I only know how to activate this setting from the parameters of lightburn or mks dlc. But I don’t know where to teach my working area, that is, the beginning and end of the area that is 334mm X 200mm. When this is the case, the machine constantly gives the alarm whenever it wants. I ask for your help on how to follow.
hmm, my work with Marlin and Smoothie had the soft limits activated and set in the firmware. There wasn’t ever anything in the user level application software used to set soft-limits. I guess maybe you are talking about using LightBurn to set the firmware configuration/settings?
BTW, nice looking build.
As @dougl mentioned soft/hard limits are dealt with by the controller. Lightburn or any other software for cnc use doesn’t deal with soft/hard limits directly, other than reporting the error to you. They may allow you to change setting on the controller, but the controller is what’s doing the detecting and reporting.
There is no teaching, you set the X and Y limits on the controller and it’s firmware detects when a command will drive it out of the work area.
In all likelihood you are not understanding how the coordinate system is working on your build (looks great). This is a common issue.
A home operation tells the controller which quadrant you are operating within, this means your code generation software, such as Lightburn, needs to know this also.
You didn’t mention how it performs a home operation and where home is for that specific machine. Software, such as Lightburn, need to know where home is to generate the proper movement codes.
I doubt there’s a problem with your system overall. You just have the controller confused as to what it’s doing.
All machines home at 0, 0 as in this graph.
If your machine homes to the front/left, then operation is in quadrant I.
My OMTech homes to the rear/left indicating operation within quadrant IV.
Make sense?
Thats a good description, getting to grips with co-ordinate systems is one of those things that is really hard to grasp until the penny ‘drops’. Another thing to understand is the concept of ‘machine’ vs ‘workspace’ co-ordinates.
Your controller keeps track of the ‘machine’ co-ordinates, it assumes it is at 0.0 when reset, but then sets them correctly after homing (using the limit switches). Once it has the ‘machine’ position fixed it enforces the soft limit.
On top of that you have workspace co-ordinates, which can have their ‘zero’ point set conveniently for the job. You work in the ‘workspace’ system, but the controller also tracks it’s ‘machine’ position to prevent you hitting the endstops. You go to the workspace ‘zero’ with G0 X0 Y0 rather than with the $H home command.
I recently found a really good page describing this:
As I say, this took me a while to really ‘grock’, hopefully Jacks description and the link above can show you the way.
If you have limit switches it is good to use them, they bring repeatability… You can re-find your position even after power outages or stalled moves. They are really useful.
That said; I run my big laser engraver without limit switches. I have a ‘hard home’ position on the physical endstops, I move the head there by hand and press ‘reset’ on the controller board. It still has soft-limits set up, I just manually home it instead of doing it via the $H command.
Thanks. I gave up on the soft limit. I’m proceeding in a different way. But there’s a different problem. The Y axis moves smoothly while the machine is processing. But when it goes back, it slows down significantly and seems to shake a little. I tried to show this in the video. I don’t understand why it does this.