What's new
What's new

CMM Software

NASATim

Plastic
Joined
Sep 17, 2019
First time poster here. Love the Forum and have watched it for years.

I run a Leitz PMMC CMM. We have the standard S2 head as well as the Precitec non-contact optical probe. Straight X, Y, Z measurements without a wrist.

We use it for non-production part inspections of both mechanical parts and optical surfaces (mirrors, lenses, etc.). We tend to look at sub-micron accuracy for both contact and non-contact. One user in particular is able to get down into the 30 nanometer range with post processing of the optical data.

We currently are using Quindos and have a love hate relationship with it. We are exploring our options for a change of software and possibly hardware too. We only use the software for data acquisition and do very little (if any) actual processing within Quindos. We export all of the data and post-process it in other various software.


Question:

1. What is the general feeling of other laser or optical non-contact probes, the accuracy, and the data quality? I know Renishaw has partnered with Nikon, but there doesn't seem to be a very big market for the non-contact so I'm struggling to find people with first hand knowledge that aren't salesmen...

2. What would be the preferred software that you would recommend other than Quindos? We do a LOT of custom programming for manual measurements like probe some points, generate a grid, set line and point spacing and then scan via the non-contact probe to collect maybe 2 million points over a 1mm by 1mm area.

3. What software is best for massive amounts of data acquisition?

4. What hardware would you recommend to get a very high level of accuracy? Can you lock the Renishaw wrist and still obtain the same level of accuracy as just straight X, Y, Z machine?

5. Any other general suggestions for our situation?

Quindos crashes constantly. We have multiple licenses spread across multiple computers for both programming (simulator), measuring, and post processing the data out of the WDB. It is very frustrating because we are seeing a 25% of time on machine to actual work completed. If a measurement takes 1 day then we plan for 4 days until we finally get Quindos to run long enough to collect the data. When it works, it is phenomenal, but when it doesn't it will cause hair loss and eye twitching.

Thanks in advance for the help! I'm just looking for like minded users with experience to give us ideas of which direction we should be looking.

NASATim
 
You're talking over my pay grade a bit, I suspect. Have you looked at Zeiss dot scan for non contact inspection including Topography, I'm assuming it still uses a version of Calypso. Also Zeiss Prismo.

BUT we here at PM have a Metrology sub-forum where the real leigh will certainly be a more than friendly and helpful aid. He so nice.

R
 
I’ve poked at the polyworks software for programming conventional CMMs however that seems to be an afterthought and their bread and butter is point cloud data collection. There are many demos on YouTube so perhaps take a look and see if it can do something for you:
 
While practical machinist is far and above the best machining forum on the whole internet, the amount of useful CMM / metrology discussion here is pretty minimal.

For questions like this I recommend you sign up at the cmmguys forum.

For such a niche topic it's remarkably active, and has some very experienced members.

FWIW, I use PowerInspect, and although I don't use it for such it does place a lot of emphasis on point cloud work.
 








 
Back
Top