This May will be my 1 year of having my X-Carve. During that time I have had some success and way more fails. One of those fails is when I accidentally run my gantry too far - either slamming my carriage into the either end of the X rail or moving it too far in the Y direction. This typically happens when I am using Easel to move the gantry and I fail to reset distance values (e.g. forgetting to enter a desired movement of 1 inch when the edit field still has 10 in it) and is quickly followed by me slamming on the E-Stop and then a few minutes of some solid pirate-like cussing while I am checking for broken parts.
I acknowledge that is 100% user error and while I have gotten better over time there always remains that chance that I will slip up and do it again (case in point, last Tuesday). I have yet to break anything when this happens but I feel like the odds are slowly changing and not in my favor.
So, I’ve been thinking about how I could improve the equipment to help prevent damage when I have a brain skip and can’t shake this idea - placing NC switches at the end of X and Y rails and wire them in series with the motor’s ground lines. When the gantry moves too far in either direction the switches would open and stop motor movement.
This is just a general idea and realize implementation could be a lot more detailed like not interfering with homing switches.
I’ve been on this forum for over a year and can’t recall any similar ideas or discussions. Has anyone tried anything like this?
Thanks,
Randy