........or dancing Stirling!


Ian I am off on a 30 hr round trip drive to deliver some parts I machined and am taking next week off to get some personal stuff done. I will do my best to probe the guitar next week and send you a screen shot!

From the looks of the # of posts, I have some catching up to do!

Mike

happy new year to all.

Mike (and anyone else that's giving my probing routines a go) - how's it going - I'm intrigued - so far there's been around 200 downloads but not a whisper of any results. It'd be good to hear some feedback - good preferably but failing that - anything...

Cheers

Ian

Ian as for me, I still haven't been able to test due to other "things" getting in the way. Mostly work, but I gotta do that! I hope to get to it soon. In fact I have to get to it soon as the guitar customer wants to get started as soon as I can get ready.

Mike

I tried your routines and they actually work. I had to do a little tweaking to get them to work without mach throwing up a few errors but after a little fiddling they actually did work.

A few suggestions I would make would be to have an option to offset the border by a selectable margin. This would enable the probe to get points at the zero plane. Or the border file could be combined with the point cloud to get those points. Also I think a good addition could be making the point cloud a g-code toolpath that Mach could follow to replicate the object just scanned.

Just remember these are opinions from an armchair CNC guy that just started probing this week! I just might not know what I'm talking about!
-Corwin

I tried your routines and they actually work. I had to do a little tweaking to get them to work without mach throwing up a few errors but after a little fiddling they actually did work.

LOL - pleased to hear it Corwin - that was the idea 

A few suggestions I would make would be to have an option to offset the border by a selectable margin. This would enable the probe to get points at the zero plane. Or the border file could be combined with the point cloud to get those points.

Good point - I toyed around for quite a while with that thought but in the end I decided it actually didn't gain anything (I think anyway): For the points file to be of any use at all, you have to have CAD/CAM software that will load it as a point cloud and then be able to produce a 3D model from that cloud and ultimately create a toolpath from that 3D model. If you have the software to do that then telling it that the model's boundary is at the zero plane is trivial (usually a function of the "drape" option or whatever. These zero values are therefore redundant in the original points file.

Also I think a good addition could be making the point cloud a g-code toolpath that Mach could follow to replicate the object just scanned.

Absolutely right - but this is not trivial. If it could do this then the software would be moving well into the realms of CAM which it was never intended to be. I suppose it would be fairly trivial to create the gcode for a "bed o nails" type machining option but I don't think that would really be very satisfactory.

Just remember these are opinions from an armchair CNC guy that just started probing this week! I just might not know what I'm talking about!
-Corwin

Hey Corin - I really appreciate your comments - around 300 downloads and you're the first one to comment in a donkey's age. 

Hi,

I need to know how you obtain that surface in Rhino from points? I try point cloud but I failed. So,...

TIA
Gabi

Hi gabi

It depends on whether you have Rhino3 or 4. If you have R4 I'm told this http://en.wiki.mcneel.com/default.aspx/McNeel/PointsetReconstruction.html works pretty well though because I only have R3 I can't use this or comment on it.

The way I did it in R3 (bound to be other ways too) is to use the drape command. Unfortunately you can't drape points. So the way I chose to do it was to convert the points into small planes - which you CAN drape.
So,  using the replace command in any decent text editor convert each point into a plane i.e. 26.00000,11.00000,0.12800 becomes _plane 26.00000,11.00000,0.12800 2 2 i.e. all your points become 2x2 planes, then just run the file as a command script in Rhino with "tools/commands/read from file" and it will create a "plane cloud". Then you just drape it. Voila.

A tip is to put _SetRedrawOff at the beginning of the command file and then _SetRedrawOn at the end - otherwise you'll need to go for a long walk whilst it's doing its thang. Hope this helps.

Cheers

Ian

Hi Ian,

Many thanks.

Regards
Gabi

Hi Stirling( Ian),  Been away from probing for a short while.  How is your probing solution coming along?? Sounds very interesting. I will try to make time to test it this week. My probing arrays have worked out fairly well they are simple but effective. Might need you to help me clean them up a bit code wise, I am a terrible programmer(;-).

Can it do an inside profile as well?  It would make an excellant program to scan the combustion chamber of a race engine head(;-) or the port areas.

Can it do layering down into a void like a combustion chamber layering the shape as it goes down. Then when it reaches the bottom in could convert to a 3d probe of the floor???

Just to let you know there is a probe tip compensation in MACH now. It will add the tip comp to the output VAR and send it to the save file.


You can turn it off by setting the tipcomp to zero.


Just a thought, (;-) TP

Hi Terry - welcome back 

I released the routines in the hope that they would be useful and that as feedback came in I'd tweak and improve them if the demand was sufficient. Unfortunately apart from one or two I can't say there's been much feedback at all though there has been around 400 downloads so far. So maybe they're doing exactly what people want or maybe they're not - I don't know.

Yes, they can do inside profiles as well as outside. As far as layering - good idea - yes they can do that as well, though at the moment you'd have to do a separate pass for each z level or layer. That would be a relatively easy addition to make - i.e. to set number of passes and stepdown per pass.

When you get to test them let me know how you get on - I may resurrect the project - as ever, depends on time and interest really.

Cheers

Ian