Quirks?

[Wingman]

I am new to PC DMIS. Used LK DMIS for years and really liked it. Now with PC DMIS I have a few issues and was hoping someone has had them before and might offer some insight. I am using 3.7

1) PC DMIS reports bogus TP values on certain features. Shows TP of 0. Why? How do I stop this?

2) No reference length in Straightness report? How can this be? I need to know if a 3 foot line is strait by X amount, if the same line varies another amount inside any 4 inches, and if the same line varies by another amount within 0.375 inches. Currently doing the calcs by hand. SUX.

3) Polar Coordinates. I want to report profile points of a circle in POLAR Coordinates instead of Cartesian. Is that possible.

4) I want to output values in a comma delimited file so I can pick it up wioth Excel. Is this possible?

More to come!!

Bill

[Joe Zastrow]

1) PC DMIS reports bogus TP values on certain features. Shows TP of 0. Why? How do I stop this?

TP with mmc ? bonus can make TP zero

[Wes Cisco]

I am new to PC DMIS. Used LK DMIS for years and really liked it. Now with PC DMIS I have a few issues and was hoping someone has had them before and might offer some insight. I am using 3.7

1) PC DMIS reports bogus TP values on certain features. Shows TP of 0. Why? How do I stop this?

2) No reference length in Straightness report? How can this be? I need to know if a 3 foot line is strait by X amount, if the same line varies another amount inside any 4 inches, and if the same line varies by another amount within 0.375 inches. Currently doing the calcs by hand. SUX.

3) Polar Coordinates. I want to report profile points of a circle in POLAR Coordinates instead of Cartesian. Is that possible.

4) I want to output values in a comma delimited file so I can pick it up wioth Excel. Is this possible?

More to come!!

Bill

I can't handle all of them, but I will pick off some:
1) Pc-Dmis and trueposition is a big fat can of bugaboos. There are several threads on this. I think I have good document to attach. Do not check the "use datums" box! Align to your datums and just use MMC or RFS for the feature. If you try to apply a modifer to a datum in pc-demon, it tries to emmulate a hardgage and only gives you a go or no go result because it allows the datums to "float".
2) I am not the best person to answer this one.
3) Oh yes. Select Prad and Pang instead of X,Y, or Z in the dimension/trueposition fields.
4)It can be done, I do not do it, but others will chime in here as well, I hope.

HTH and Welcome to the wonderful world of the Demon.

[JamesMannes]

Good afternoon Wingman,
Welcome to the board!!!
For starters, when posting it is helpful for the members to know which version you are using (there are people out there using3.2063, 3.25mr1,mr2, 3.5,3.5mr1 all the way up 4.1).
Anyways, I'll take a guess that you are using 3.7or some 3.7mr? With the introduction of 3.7 the TP(when using modifiers MMC or LMC) a best fitting of sorts was utilized to mimc a functional gage. Hopefully this attachment will explain...
The other stuff I will let some else tackle. Gott get back to work!!

Took a look for an answer to your other question...
I will be interested to see the answers cause I don't have one for you. Between my brother and myself we know everything, he knows the answer to that one.

[craiger_ny]

I am new to PC DMIS. Used LK DMIS for years and really liked it. Now with PC DMIS I have a few issues and was hoping someone has had them before and might offer some insight. I am using 3.7


1) PC DMIS reports bogus TP values on certain features. Shows TP of 0. Why? How do I stop this?

Using material condition modifiers on datums do that, Try this instead

2) No reference length in Straightness report? How can this be? I need to know if a 3 foot line is strait by X amount, if the same line varies another amount inside any 4 inches, and if the same line varies by another amount within 0.375 inches. Currently doing the calcs by hand. SUX.

Hope someone else helps. I have not had the need so we'll see what folks come up with.

3) Polar Coordinates. I want to report profile points of a circle in POLAR Coordinates instead of Cartesian. Is that possible.

WWS

4) I want to output values in a comma delimited file so I can pick it up wioth Excel. Is this possible?

Try this:

FPTR       =FILE/OPEN,C:\TEST.TXT,WRITE
V1         =FILE/WRITELINE,FPTR,VARIABLENAME + "," + VARIABLENAME2 + "," + VARIABLENAME3
            FILE/CLOSE,FPTR

In PCDMIS you concatenate with the + symbol

Craig

[Jan d.]

4) I want to output values in a comma delimited file so I can pick it up wioth Excel. Is this possible?

Bill, I am also a newbie at this, but see this thread. I posted some code and got a LOT of help from Craiger. It works wonders. It creates a comma delimitted file of whatever you can come up with.

Make sure the called files exist! If they do not exist, you get errors.

http://www.pcdmisforum.com/showthread.php?t=2146

Also another tip: learn to work with TutorElement's! They're great!



Good luck, Jan.

[JamesMannes]

Sorry Wingman, I read your post too fast. You did tell us what version. Dohh!!!

[Wingman]

Thanks to all for your insights. Looks like the TP is well documented. Why doesn't Hexagon fix that? LOL Anyway, thanks for the workarounds.
Still no solution for the Straightness reference length. I called Customer Support and got the following:
Measure the section in 10mm lines (67 of them in my case). Report the straightness of each (sort of covers it but not completely). Construct lines out of subsets of 10 each of these and reporty thiose to the next tolerance level. Construct final line from all the others and report final value.
First, this is extremely cumbersome. Plus, PCDMIS doesn't include all points within a feature presented for construction. It just uses the centroid as far as I can tell. So, the straightness will not be correct for the constructed lines UNLESS all the pointas are taken as points and constructed (200 points per side MIN in my example). OUCH!!
I'll use the Excel spreadsheet method - LOL. I can see now that I am going to have to find some time to learn VB. Hmm.

Again, Thanks to ALL
Bill

[JamesMannes]

Thanks to all for your insights. Looks like the TP is well documented. Why doesn't Hexagon fix that? LOL Anyway, thanks for the workarounds....
Bill

It is fixed in 4.1

[Wes Cisco]

It is fixed in 4.1

Didn't they say that with 3.5? (Sorry Matt, not trying to push your button )

[JamesMannes]

Didn't they say that with 3.5? (Sorry Matt, not trying to push your button )

Who is they?
Oh WILCOX/BNS, yeah yeah, but this time it really is fixed(I think).

[Wingman]

While I have you guys here, is it possible to extract specific points from a feature to construct another feature? For example, say I have a line of 67 points and I want to use 10 of them to create another line.
Or, say I had 3 planes of 4 points each and wanted to construct a 4th plane of 12 points using the points in the first three planes. Is that possible with PCDMIS?
Sorry to be such a Pain in the a$$ but I just got used to doing things a certain way and I need to re-train myself to PC DMIS way of thinking. Don't want to give up on certain things if I don't have to.
Bill

[craiger_ny]

Yes you can asign variables with hit data. Be careful, I'm not sure entirely what you plan to do so some consideration must be made but yes you can.

Craig

[JIM HARRIS]

There is a script on the wilcox site to extract points from a feature.