Hi,
I'm new to all this stuff, CNC, Mach 3, everthing.
I acquired someones project that was setup with Mach3 and drove servos. after finding out servos were not the best fit for my application, I bought stepper motors, a G540, Smooth stepper, and a 48V power supply to retrofit in the machine.

So now I've installed the motors, made cables, (controllers are just mounted to a board till I make a suitable cabinet to house it all), figured out how to make the optical limits work and now I don't know where to land the signals from the limits.

The optical limits are NPN and go from an active low of about a half volt to an active high of 5V when the flag breaks the light beam.

I've attached a sketch of my wiring so far.

Besides not knowing where to land the signal wires from the limits, I have a few other issues.

when starting up Mach, I get a message estop not assigned to smooth stepper. I click the window and click reset on the screen and the message appears again, then I click it again and it goes away. If I hit the Estop, the red fault light goes on  on the G540, but Mach doesn't show that an Estop is active.

The other thing is when I move the X axis .500 inches (according to the screen on Mach) I have only 0.3965 movement of the axis (as read by my test indicator)

any help will be greatly appreciated.

Ray

For motion, it's should be fairly simple.  You'll need to know the pitch of your ballscrews, but from there, just follow the formula in the manual for mach 3.  I remember when I first did this, and yes, I was lost too.  As soon as I followed along with what was in the manual, it worked perfectly.

Also, mach has great video tutorials on motor tuning.  I believe thats where you are right now.

For the estop, sound like you haven't set the input signal for the estop inside mach.