A nearby Community College has a Romer absolute arm that has been setting unused for several years. I recently retired from an engineering career and have volunteered to get the arm up and running so the students can learn some basic concepts about CMM. The school has lost their USB key license for the PC-DMIS software and it will be several months before they look at budgets and getting the software might not make the cut.
I would like to get something very basic going just so the students can try the arm. My thought was to create a simple script that would allow the student to digitize several points and then save them to a text file. They could then import those points into their CAD software and generate features off the points. From there they could generate an stl file and print something with their 3D printer. So the lesson would be more related to reverse engineering as opposed to part validation.
A simple script that would just collect a bunch of points seems like it would be easy to create. No need to create any alignments or other features, just capture a series of raw point locations. I've got some experience with programming, but not with DMIS. It would be great if someone had had a script that would do this?
Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!
