We recently purchased a 9-12-8 Global S machine with a scanning head. The length of the indexing portion (scanning head + longer tip) kind of freaked us out, and we wanted to be able to simulate the machine offline in order to catch collisions between the head or probe and the legs of the bridge. However, the closest model in the PC-DMIS (2019 R1) model list is the 9-12-8 Evo. The hardware dimensions seem close enough to use, but the home positions of this virtual machine and our physical machine differ by several inches. This is a problem because when we put the CAD model on the same granite position as in the real world, there is a large offset from reality on the physical machine. I could ditch the virtual machine and run my manual alignment to get it to work online, but a better solution would seem to be to move the home position on the virtual machine to better correlate with reality.
From what I've found on this forum already, it seems like many of you have done similar things with the machine models. I've played around with the usermachine.dat file a little bit (starting with a copy of the Global Evo 9-12-8 from machine.dat), but it's not at all clear to me from
the help file what I would need to do change the origin/start point/home position, or even if those are in fact the same. Could any of you point me in the right direction? Thank you.
Well... in order to make it look right I had to shift the origin in the .DRAW file, which I did by changing the file extension to .CAD, importing it into a PC-DMIS routine, and using Operation -> Graphic Display Window -> Transform. Except that now the probe takes hits six inches off the part offline. I'll keep messing with it and post what I figure out.
That was in addition to moving the joints around like you described,
Kp61dude! . Thank you very much for the pointers on that. It's so weird that the joints are in a different coordinate system...
Well... in order to make it look right I had to shift the origin in the .DRAW file, which I did by changing the file extension to .CAD, importing it into a PC-DMIS routine, and using Operation -> Graphic Display Window -> Transform. Except that now the probe takes hits six inches off the part offline. I'll keep messing with it and post what I figure out.
That was in addition to moving the joints around like you described,
Kp61dude! . Thank you very much for the pointers on that. It's so weird that the joints are in a different coordinate system...