End Stops
12.04.2021 -
- We now have Endstops for the rotation and the translation of our axis. Writing this down, it sounds not as impressive anymore, but it is an important thing for the controller to know where the motors are, especially for the linear movement. With that we can get not only the relative position via the steps of the motor, but also the absolute position of the axis. Otherwise, after each "startup" of the system the motor would not know where it is and if it is told to go somewhere, that somewhere might be out of physical bounds. These end stops also do a surprisingly good job in compensating lost steps (at least for the rotation)
- For the translation a simple switch does the trick.
- For the rotation however, we could not use a switch. By that we would limit our movement to < 360°. So instead we went for a simple "light barrier" which gets interrupted by a pin attached to the axis.
- The whole thing looks like this
- But one rather big problem remains:
- Even we are about to loose overview of what is what in this mess ... we definitively need to design a pcb ... but for now, i might do some cleaning up using a "perfboard"