Polyworks Tech Tip: This video demonstrates how to quickly and easily build a probe in the PolyWorks CNC CMM Interface.
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In this video, I'll be taking a look at probe building in the PolyWorks CNC CMM interface. You have PolyWorks set up, it's installed, it's up and running on your machine. The first thing you'll need to get a handle on is building probes and calibrating them. I'll just show you a few quick tips. PolyWorks has made the layout pretty simple and pretty easy to work with. With just a few simple icons we need to become familiar with. If you look down on the bottom toolbar, the first icon we need to press is the probing device properties button. We'll give that a click.
In this dialog, we're gonna go to the tools tab, and this is where we build our probes. On PolyWorks, probes are referred to as tools, and you can see I've got a few existing builds here. What we can do in this dialog is create a new one by pressing the plus button and then we just have a blank slate with a catalog of components that we add to our build. You can see it's already recognizing that I have a PH10 Renishaw probe as my probe pad. Then I would just build down from there.
If you are having trouble remembering some of the components, what you can do is create a duplicate of an existing probe build. They allow you to do that with this button here. Then we can just rename it to whatever we want it. If we wanted to just add a stylus at the bottom like a new stylus but everything else was the same, what we could do is just rename this to say a 20x2 millimeter. Then we can just change the bottom stylus. Remove that one, and now I'll just add my 2 millimeter tip. You can see it up here. Just hit the add button, and there's our new stylus. That's a nice feature. I'll go ahead and create that and now that's added to the list.
Okay. Let's go through the process of creating a new tool from scratch. What we'll do is first is press the plus button to create a tool. Here, we have a choice of naming either automatically or specifics. I'll go with automatic because it'll just create the name based on my build, as opposed to specific which would be me choosing the name myself. The first thing we'll add is the PAA1 thread converter. You can see it's already selected the PH10M probe head for me. I don't need to find that. The thread converter goes beneath the probe head, and to add that, we're gonna press the add button. Beneath that, we have our TP20 probe body. Let's go ahead and add that. Beneath that, we have our TP20 module. We have the extended force, medium force, and so on. If you're not sure which one to choose, just take a look at your probe module, and it's written right on the side.
I'll go with the TP20 standard force, SF, add that to my build and the last component is our stylus. Now, you can see these columns are organized by size, length, and so forth. I'm just going to scroll down. I'll just go with 5x50, and add that to build. That's it. When we're done with the build, you can see the automatic naming has kicked in, and it's named it for me. That would be my recommendation. Then, we hit create to add that to our library. We've done that, let's exit this dialog. In the main interface on the bottom toolbar, you see a little window where we can select the tool build that we want. That's about it. That's probe building in the PolyWorks CMM CNC interface. Thanks for joining me, and we'll see you next time.
