Well, I've pretty much had it with these loop programs. I've written many of them, but I need a new method of programming that is less prone to corruption. We have two cmm's, one with a 13-station fixture and the other with a 20-station. The fixtures are practically the same, except one has 7 more stations than the other (bigger cmm). I have many loop programs written for the 13-station that recall fixture alignments: within each station, a plane and line are taken from the fixture surfaces, and a midpoint from the part. A DO-loop is used. I would sometimes encounter a problem when I would save one of these with a new name and then make modifications to run a different, tho similar part. I would also get corruption with various copying/pasting. I could live with all that, because it didn't happen very often.
However, since i've been copying the programs over to a new directory and modifying them for the 20-station, most of the programs are ending up currupted. They will run station 1 but nothing else, or they won't run at all because theoreticals have changed. Somehow, the program must not like having all it's fixture alignments replaced with new ones.
We're a fast-paced job shop, and my bosses don't want me re-writing programs for a new cmm. They want me to copy and paste everything to save time. I don't blame them. Copying parts of programs to write others was always touted as a great feature of PCDMIS, but I'm beginning to realize it is the cause of un-fixable problems.
So, to make a long story longer, I think if I had a way of running parts on these fixtures without recalling fixture alignments I would have fewer corruption problems when cloning. That's my theory. What other programming methods could be used to get an alignment on each part, and check either ALL parts or check ANY ONE part on the fixture? In the distant past when I used the built-in LOOP function, there were too many problems with move points not looping, true-position values increasing.......so I don't want anything to do with that. Any ideas?
Whew! Aren't ya glad ya clicked on this one?
However, since i've been copying the programs over to a new directory and modifying them for the 20-station, most of the programs are ending up currupted. They will run station 1 but nothing else, or they won't run at all because theoreticals have changed. Somehow, the program must not like having all it's fixture alignments replaced with new ones.
We're a fast-paced job shop, and my bosses don't want me re-writing programs for a new cmm. They want me to copy and paste everything to save time. I don't blame them. Copying parts of programs to write others was always touted as a great feature of PCDMIS, but I'm beginning to realize it is the cause of un-fixable problems.
So, to make a long story longer, I think if I had a way of running parts on these fixtures without recalling fixture alignments I would have fewer corruption problems when cloning. That's my theory. What other programming methods could be used to get an alignment on each part, and check either ALL parts or check ANY ONE part on the fixture? In the distant past when I used the built-in LOOP function, there were too many problems with move points not looping, true-position values increasing.......so I don't want anything to do with that. Any ideas?

Whew! Aren't ya glad ya clicked on this one?
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