Limit Sensors for Lift

[Richard McClellan]

We just got our lift moving today, and it seems to work very nicely. The only issue we have is that if we keep the lift motors on during extension, we will eventually break our cable, so we need some limit switches of some kind.

Microswitches may or may not work, because the arm will not stop immediately after hitting the switch and may break the switch. We also thought about a quadrature encoder, but that's not absolute, so we'd have to calibrate it to a known position every time the robot is turned on.

What do other teams use to limit the movement of a lift?