PolyWorks Tech Tip: This video shows you some tips on how to quickly add new probe angles to your tools in PolyWorks CMM programming. You can use a traditional dialog box or mouse over your cad model to pick the perfect angle on the fly.
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In this video, I'm going to be talking about how to create tool orientations in PolyWorks. In an earlier video, I showed you how to build the tools, so now I'll show you how to create orientations. If you look down here on the bottom toolbar, you'll see a little icon, looks like a probe. This is our tool orientations icon. Here you'll see a list of all your tools. We can view them all, which is the default view, or individually, if we just simply click on the one we want. This one here has quite a few orientations. What I'll do is select one that has only one orientation, the default A0/B0.
A few different ways we can add tool orientations or angles. If we right-click this area here, we can just select Create Orientations. It opens a dialog box on the left. We can add them individually in the individual mode just by simply selecting the A angle and the B angle. So A45/B90, and you can see that's added there or we can select the multiple mode, and we can add and arrange. If I just wanted to do, say, the A angle from 0 to 90 every 7.5 degrees, and we can even leave the B add 0 [SP], and I'll show you how that works. It's created a range of angles, quite a few, actually, just in that simple, quick step. That's a quick way to do that.
Staying with this tool in tool orientation dialog, I'll show you a few other options here. A nice option that I like is the view in 3D mode, like a 3D viewer. What that does is that it gives you an idea of what those angles actually look like and you can actually rotate this as well just using your mouse.
Another great way to create new tip angles is use the pick and create from CAD method. If you look down here on the bottom toolbar, you can see the little arrow. Pressing that allows us to use the mouse to select tip angles. So you can see when the arrow turns yellow, it means the tip angle is available, but I just don't have it in my probe build. When it's a red angle, it just means it's out of range, which is impossible for this probe to create and the green one, see if I can get a green one there, means that I have that in my build already.
Let's take a look at this board here on the side, and I'll just mouse over the plane that it's normal to. That is the tip I need, A90/B-127. It's a real quick way if you're working with CAD, just give it a click and it will create it, and it will also calibrate it if you so choose.
Just a few quick tips on how to create new tip angles in PolyWorks CNC CMM programing. I hope you found that useful. Thanks for joining me, and we'll see you next time.
