I’ve currently got a fancy emergency stop big red button on my DIY printer, but I was just thinking it would be nice to have a hard switch that gets hit if my Orion piezo sensor doesn’t work for some reason (though it has been super reliable). I’d hate to think what would happen as it keeps raising the platform up into the carriage. Just to make sure I’m not overthinking this: The smoothie config is currently set for normally closed operation on the emergency stop, so if wire in the 2nd switch on the Z axis as normally closed I can just wire the switches in series when plugging into the smoothie, right? (I have this tendency to overthink everything and get in trouble, but this seems right to me).
makes sense. We normally use the ‘NC’ configuration so even a broken wire, connector, etc will trigger the event. Putting another safety switch inline is a good implementation.
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Sounds right to me too!
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What does your emergency stop button actually do?
Mine drops power to the whole machine…
Doesn’t the smoothie have a Z limit input?
It does cut power, but I was just worried that the orion piezo detector might fail (which I use to get to Z==0) and the platform would keep grinding away destroying something. There may will be a way to set Z limit in the smoothie, but it would have to know what Z level it started at, and it has no idea on power up where it was left last time (or if I manually moved it). I did get the separate hard switch working, so if the orion fails, it will just compress the platform leveling springs about a half millimeter before stopping and shouldn’t destroy anything.
You should home it at boot time, that’s general good practice. Then you can rely on both hard and soft limits.
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But homing Z is done using the orion, which is the bit I worried about failing (though in practice it has been perfect since I installed it months and months ago, it is still more complicated than a microswitch though).