I find I spend a lot of time babysitting my machine and have been looking at plasma tables with anti collision torch mounts lately. This got me wondering about a possible retrofit on my crossfire pro. After a little digging I found this:
My question to everyone is how would a fellow wire this into the existing electronics? The IHS function on the mount itself doesn’t come into play as my machine already has a fucntioning IHS, however what could be done to make the collision sensors work?
My first thought was to wire them in such a way that it broke the circuit for torch on/off. Though this is not ideal as if it contacts something during a jog it wont care.
I’m thinking in series in the loop with the limit switches. At least in my configuration (Original Crossfire running Mach3) that’s the way it would certainly work, tripping an immediate halt to all operation and necessitating a limit override command to get back to operational state once the collision has been cleared.
I don’t believe firecontrol has an provisions for anything like this. This is why my mind went to the torch fire circuit - firecontrol would see that the torch firing has been stopped and throw an error code. I have not been able to get it to throw an error code while jogging no matter what I unplug or interrupt though.
If the machine had limit switches I could possibly just kill power to the steppers and torch on/off via a relay. Firecontrol would continue to run until it saw an IHS failure or torch fire failure. I’d then be able to re-home my machine and restart my cut from where ever.
I had hoped there would be a pin on the board I could grab that I could use, but I again doubt firecontrol has anything like this coded into it so I’d have to piggyback off of some other error.
