Hey guys. Built myself an FLA 100 machine. So far been a fun and educational experience.

I have a few questions regarding mach3. Im a bit stubborn being an electrical engineering major, and after a week of tinkering, i'd like to finally put my issues to bed.

For starters, i have normally open switches at each end of my axis. one side of each axis works almost perfectly as home switches, however my x axis doesn't move forward until the switch is cleared. Settings are the same throughout all 3 axies.

All 3 home switches have their own pin on the HobbyCNCPro board. The 3 limits are tied together on one pin.

How can i setup my home switches to also act as limits? the machine will go right past em when jogging! and if i set the limits to the same ports as the home switches, once the machine homes, it stops because it passed the limit.

When i configured software limits, i would run my machine to all extrema's of all 3 axis, and place the farthest away in the soft limits under Max..however, i'd never get the slow down or the safety halt of Mach3 if i tried to go too far. I didn't have hardware switches enabled at this point. However the hardware switches kill it immediately so thats good.

Motor tuning! Im using Nate's 1/2-10 5 start leadscrews, 200 step/rev steppers and, for now just to get everything perfect, full stepping mode. I should be at 400 steps per inch correct? Strangely, its off in doing 1 inch movements in both x and y directions...giving me more than an inch. Around 380 seems to work close..but i still need to fine tune. I will end up runing in 1/2 or 1/4 stepping modes. When jogging motors sound fine, no stalling or anything..my shaft couplers are attached plenty solid. I know the calculation is result - expect, then 1+percent of error * step number.....just 20 steps seemed a bit off to me. I guess i don't fully understand all the numbers on a leadscrew.

I will say using the joystick from my old DOS machine to do touchoff's is fun..Gives me plenty of looks and questions from fellow geeks that stop by. I think i could gut one of my old Colecovision controllers and use it for the same and entering coordinates.

thanks in advance guys