CMMXYZ Tech Tip:
You can avoid collisions during the calibration of tactile probes on Bridge CMMs by running a calibration collision check. PC-DMIS will create the necessary safety moves to avoid crashing during tip rotations. This safety feature was introduced in PC-DMIS 2019 R1.
Click Here to learn more about our affordable Software Support Packages - the same group that makes these Tech Tips!
In this video, I wanted to show you a great new feature that was introduced in PC-DMIS 2019 R1. This is the probe calibration collision check. This check was introduced to avoid crashing the probe when it swings around on a long build like this and could potentially smash into that bridge. What I've done in this program I wrote was put the calibration sphere on the extreme left-hand side so that under normal circumstances prior to this collision check, it would actually collide into that bridge.
My profile has three pro builds. I have A0B0, A90B-90, so pointing to the left, and then A90B180 pointing to the back of the machine. With those three, you will see a lot of swinging and rotating in the horizontal position, which in this case, without the collision check would crash into both the left and the right-hand side of the bridge.
Let's go to my PC-DMIS program and I'll launch the inspection and I'll show you some of the new prompts. Okay. So, here we are in my PC-DMIS program. The first thing I want to take a look at is the settings in setup options, F5 on your keyboard. In the parent machine tab, you can see at the bottom there, there's a section for the CMM Limits for collision check. I did not fill these in, these were automatically populated by the software reading the control. This is true for most controllers. You can edit these yourself if you need to.
But for me, I found it loaded automatically and it just worked the first time, which is great. Let's go ahead and launch our probe calibration. Here's the first new prompt, "Do you want to run the collision check?" So, I'll answer, Yes, and we'll see what's next. PC-DMIS has run a quick mini collision check in the background and reported its findings. In my case, it needed to add three safety moves. So, it should be safe to calibrate now. We'll go ahead and click OK and launch my calibration.
We're back to our machine and the calibration has started. Here's my A0B0. Obviously, this one will be fine because it's vertical and it's nowhere near the bridge. When this one is done, we're going to switch to A90B-90 and then you'll see the safety moves. Okay. Tip one is done and you see that move there. That's safety move number one, and it's safe to rotate. If that move wasn't there it is a possibility that could have collided with the bridge, so it puts it in the center of the volume, safely rotates, and proceeds to calibrate.
That's the end of this tip. Now this is another safety move. See how it moved to the center and you can see right there that that would have actually crashed into the bridge on the right-hand side. It was a nice, safe move. Just went to the center, rotated and we're good to proceed. That's about it. I hope you found that useful. Thanks for joining me, and we'll see you next time.
