I'm hoping someone can help. I have been using and programming PC-DMIS for about a year and my company is thinking of buying a Wenzel, which uses Open DMIS, instead of the B&S that I want. Does anybody know anything about the machine or software? Any help would be appreciated.
I've been working with PC-DMIS for about 10 - 12 years. Before that, I worked with Avail NT and the proprietary software that ran the Tarus CMMs. Now I'm working with a Wenzel dual arm running Open Dmis. We just had the updated software installed after purchasing the service contract. Beyond that, the help desk at Xspect is basically worthless. We just had the machine calibrated and I spent about 6 hours figuring out how to get the dual arms back into a correct master/slave mode. The tech that came out to calibrate the machine didn't know anything about dual arm operations. Neither did the tech who I talked to over the phone for over an hour. A third tech out of California called to profess his ignorance and a fourth out of Cal never returned my call.
So...
The software definitely has some strange quirks - I haven't been able to create auxillary alignments and report out features, then go back to the first alignment and report them again. I don't care for the alignment options at all. Iterative alignments are NOT true iterative alignments, since the machine does not cycle to remeasure points. The construction menu is next to worthless - probably take me weeks to figure it out and it still doesn't do what I want it to.
You have to drag items all over the place to create constructions - then you have to drag them into the program window or the editor to write them to the dmis file. Every time you set a default for items like prehit/retract, the software dumps some sort of worthless macro into your dmis file that you have to drag into the editor to delete. The back and forth between the edit window and the program window will drive you batty. You have to create tolerances for each axis, radius, diameter, etc. before reporting features out.
Items like prehit and retract do not work like they do in pc-dmis. There is no override for small holes, so every time you check one, you're probably going to get an error message that the distance is too large to perform the measurement. There is no reference measuring option and you don't have the ability to use variable substitution equations in your target measurement. No find hole either - you'll have to edit the individual hit points until your program works.
At least, these are the issues that I am having and since tech support is non-existent, chances are I'll never know if they actually DO exist in one form or another. At the training session I went to at Xspect, the guy teaching the class barely knew the software himself. He kept driving the machine around in manual mode measuring features. It's a DCC machine - who the **** is going to use it for large quantities of manual measurements?!!
If you do get stuck with this crap, you can hit me up with questions in the future. Not that I'm going to have many answers, but I'm stuck with it and I'm actually using it, so chances are you'll get more help from me than you would from their tech support.
I've been working with PC-DMIS for about 10 - 12 years. Before that, I worked with Avail NT and the proprietary software that ran the Tarus CMMs. Now I'm working with a Wenzel dual arm running Open Dmis. We just had the updated software installed after purchasing the service contract. Beyond that, the help desk at Xspect is basically worthless. We just had the machine calibrated and I spent about 6 hours figuring out how to get the dual arms back into a correct master/slave mode. The tech that came out to calibrate the machine didn't know anything about dual arm operations. Neither did the tech who I talked to over the phone for over an hour. A third tech out of California called to profess his ignorance and a fourth out of Cal never returned my call.
So...
The software definitely has some strange quirks - I haven't been able to create auxillary alignments and report out features, then go back to the first alignment and report them again. I don't care for the alignment options at all. Iterative alignments are NOT true iterative alignments, since the machine does not cycle to remeasure points. The construction menu is next to worthless - probably take me weeks to figure it out and it still doesn't do what I want it to.
You have to drag items all over the place to create constructions - then you have to drag them into the program window or the editor to write them to the dmis file. Every time you set a default for items like prehit/retract, the software dumps some sort of worthless macro into your dmis file that you have to drag into the editor to delete. The back and forth between the edit window and the program window will drive you batty. You have to create tolerances for each axis, radius, diameter, etc. before reporting features out.
Items like prehit and retract do not work like they do in pc-dmis. There is no override for small holes, so every time you check one, you're probably going to get an error message that the distance is too large to perform the measurement. There is no reference measuring option and you don't have the ability to use variable substitution equations in your target measurement. No find hole either - you'll have to edit the individual hit points until your program works.
At least, these are the issues that I am having and since tech support is non-existent, chances are I'll never know if they actually DO exist in one form or another. At the training session I went to at Xspect, the guy teaching the class barely knew the software himself. He kept driving the machine around in manual mode measuring features. It's a DCC machine - who the **** is going to use it for large quantities of manual measurements?!!
If you do get stuck with this crap, you can hit me up with questions in the future. Not that I'm going to have many answers, but I'm stuck with it and I'm actually using it, so chances are you'll get more help from me than you would from their tech support.
