CMMXYZ PC-DMIS Tech Tip:
This video expands on an earlier tutorial and shows how to use point data from Circle and Cone features to create distance and surface deviation dimensions.
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In this video, I wanted to talk about an enhancement that was introduced back in version 2018 R1. About a year ago, I did a video on this called Accessing Feature Point Data in PC-DMIS. The reason I wanted to revisit this topic now was because, in the last couple weeks, it's just come up a few times in tech support and then training. It was actually during a custom on-site training I did in the last week. Custom training is something that we offer in addition to our conventional classroom training. In custom training, we would work with your parts, your drawings, and your reports, and together, come up with a good programming strategy. If you haven't already, check out the training section of our website to get more information.
The first instance of using this in the last few weeks was in this tech support case. The question to me was, "How do I measure a circle at specific points, so the circle diameter at specific points?" In other words, sort of simulating, like, a micrometer check where you would check in one spot and then rotate 90 degrees and then check the other spot. It's like an ovality check. What I suggested was simply use a distance dimension.
I'll demonstrate on this bird. Pick the circle from the feature list, and you can see on the screen here that those measured hit points are actually shown in little, black dots. Now, we can actually just click on them. Select that one and that one, and you can see in the code that it's actually extracting out each hit from the circle. We're not doing location of the circle but actually, doing distance using the points from the circle.
The second time I used this in the last couple weeks as a solution was in the custom training I was doing in a mold shop. The mold cavity, in this case, was actually just a cone. They measure the cone, but what they really wanted was surface data, like how much deviation was on the surface because it's a cavity of an injection mold. What I suggested was using location dimension, selecting the cone, and then again, we can have access to all of these points inside the column feature. All we did was select the ones we wanted to analyze, just with our mouse and then instead of dimensioning the XYZ value, we would do a T value for the individual hits inside the cone, and then that would give us surface deviation on the cavity.
That's just two recent examples of how I suggested this useful tool in PC-DMIS that's actually been around, at the time of this recording, for about four years. I hope you found that useful and that you can use that in your programming. Thanks for joining me, and we'll see you next time.
