White Light Scanning

Cheryl Heller of GIS is the local contact.

Douglas Sobalac of Mycrona in Chicago, Mycrona of North America.

Atos / Gom

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?

Capture 3D is who demo'd at our place also.
Set up time was minimal. The the one block he did for us was a pretty large form steel from a hot stamp die. (Size aprox. 5 x 8 x 12 inches.) Had some complex shapes. With the unit he had, I forget the 'resolution', it took him about 20 minutes to take enough pictures to get the data he wanted. Everything stitched together real nice and there were no obvious problem areas.
This generated something like 500,000 points. When the software was done 'editing', there were around 53,000 points. It would take me a bit more than a couple hours running surface scans on a cmm to generate 53,000 points. He claimed accuracy of +/- .001" at the resolution he was scanning, with the unit he had. the pictures he was taking were pretty close to the block, so he was getting points with a tight spacing.
Even if he was a bit bold in describing the accuracy, this would still be good enough for our reverse engineering needs. Plans also include receiving inspection of machined replacement details for our stamping dies. Mgt. wants 100% inspection on all outside sourced replacement tooling. We are doing aprox. 0% right now.

We have an ATOS at our facility. It is portable and can do from small to very large parts. With the added photogramatry it is pretty accurate. The Mycrona is a multi sensor machineand does't require painting of the part you are checking, although it has the measuring envolope of a cmm. I think it depends on what you are going to use it for.

We have a Metris LC50 scanner connected up to our Brown & Sharpe Exel 9-12-9 and it works fine. As Matt suggested earlier it is not as accurate as the CMM but works fine for some of our applications where tolerances are generous. We have its accuracy at about 0.012microns maybe slightly less.

It comes with its own Metris software for using the laser and point cloud filtering etc but we use Imageware surfacing to create the non-geometric surfaces. Depending on what you are connecting it to you may need some work done on your controller, we had to and it did get a bit costly

We have a Metris LC50 scanner connected up to our Brown & Sharpe Exel 9-12-9 and it works fine. As Matt suggested earlier it is not as accurate as the CMM but works fine for some of our applications where tolerances are generous. We have its accuracy at about 0.012microns maybe slightly less.

It comes with its own Metris software for using the laser and point cloud filtering etc but we use Imageware surfacing to create the non-geometric surfaces. Depending on what you are connecting it to you may need some work done on your controller, we had to and it did get a bit costly

Hey Jon, that scanner you have, it works off the CMM controller, so it is using the CMM's XYZ axis readers for location and stuff, is that right? Then it uses those values in conjunction with the scanner calibration and the data the scanner 'sees'? So, it is acting, more or less, like a probe on the machine?

Does PCDMIS 'talk' to any of the light scanning equipment?

I have 8 years using WLS (whitelight scanner) as well as CMM, WLS is pretty accurate but has issues with noise ( light reflection back to the cameras) and the paint coating you need to put on the parts.
if you can collect as little noise possible without coating then
yes is very accurate but it will not replace CMMs.
here we scan very small blades just to generate a preliminary CAD model very quick, then we process the same blade on the CMM with the CAD from WLS to refine measurements, then we correct CAD with CMM data.

We just bought AICON 3D systems and I've been very impressed with the accuracy of the product. Something you might consider looking into.

I ran an ATOS white light and blue light scanner. It was nice but the only drawback was that you had to spray what you wanted to scan in white so it would scan correctly.

Mycrona is Hexagon