White Light Scanning

As far as I know, the scanner will NOT be as accurate as your CMM. It will not replace your CMM, the accuracy is not as high. There will STILL be jobs you need the CMM for. Just as you can not replace micrometers with calipers, you can not replace a CMM with a scanner.

Check out the Mycrona

We have just purchased a lazer scanner (high dollar) to measure the concave and contour of our blades the radius, width, thickness and face alignment and it seems to works well. But the catch is the tolerance is pretty wide open +/- .015" is about the smallest on the blades but if your looking for +/- .001 or .002" then your out of luck. And for the software it came with GEOMAGIC which from my buddy that uses it ,say's it's great...

NVision sells one.

https://www.nvision3d.com

I talked to the guy and asked him why they do not run PC-DMIS. They told me that thier stuff was waayy to specialized for commodity software. That's the point when I started loosing interest.

I have never had any real luck with white light lasers. They are very repeatable. Sometimes amazingly so. But we could not get the data to correlate with CMM data. And it's the CMM's we really trust. But people are claiming breakthroughs. So you never know. But I am not optimistic.



Jan.

MrComment:The white light scanner wont be running PCDMIS of course.

KmCMM:Check out the Mycrona

Good call. With this you can use PC-DMIS for White Light sensor.

Depending on the type of part you check (ie: color, material....) you may need to paint them to get a consistant color or mated finish. This will add .0005" to .001" thichness/size. If you can paint evenly?

BS

Scanners vs. cmm

I have seen a few demo'd in the last couple weeks and have had some exposure to a couple others in operation in the last couple years. Our company is investigating the possibility of purchase of a white light scanner and I have been 'appointed' to assist the engineer in evaluating several systems.
Our primary use will be to reverse engineer newly built and existing tooling. During development of the parts, the electronic data of the tooling is rendered useless by hand working forms on the dies. Impossible to cut replacement tooling from cad data without redoing all the hand work each time the tooling is recut. Some of our dies have a run life of 3-4 months and at that time the steels are worn out and need replacement.
The best system, FOR OUR NEEDS, at this time seems to be the ATOS. Pricey, but with the bundeled software, I think it's the ticket.
I don't think a scanner will ever 100% replace a cmm. For one thing, there is just waaayyyy to much data generated. Just how many points/features do you really need to check to verify a part?

Check out the Mycrona

Kevin - Who is you Mycrona rep. Is Michael still around? I used to use one of these awhile ago.

Atos

The best system, FOR OUR NEEDS, at this time seems to be the ATOS. Pricey, but with the bundeled software, I think it's the ticket.

We had Capture 3D in to do a demo with an ATOS package. The Gom software looked like it had some potential as well. In actual practice though, hows the setup time and accuracy compare to that of one of your CMMs using PCDMIS?

Kevin - Who is you Mycrona rep. Is Michael still around? I used to use one of these awhile ago.

Its been awhile since I talked to them, but I think it was Michael. We ended up going through one of their distributers out of Fort Wayne.