I was thinking to throw all shifted points into a bin, creating variables for possible allowable positions and degrees of rotation for each modified datum. Allowing these variables to be over-written as the part measurement proceeds, but ONLY if the freedom is reduced as more and more information is collected.
This would allow simultaneous evaluation to work correctly, even when different feature control frames are used throughout the drawing. No real reason this will not work in PC-DMIS as well.
Be careful what you wish for. Removing the Datum shift from the report sucks. I like many, did not understand what it was telling me for a long time. Once I figured it out, it became a valuable tool for troubleshooting programs. Now that they have taken it away, I am screaming to have it brought back. Just last week we were having issues with the results of a part and it wasn't making any sense as to why. The part was fine but PC-DMIS was telling me it was not. Finally, i saved the program with the measured data as a 2020 R1 version and opened it in that version. Of course I had to recreate the GD&T callout but as soon as I did, the datum shift showed me that the rotation was being fixed when it shouldn't have been. I still don't know why it was fixed but i ended up deleting the feature and recreated it. After that, the datum shift was correct, the results were correct and everything was fine. I assume the feature was somehow corrupted by the many software updates we have done over the years. I would have never figured this out without seeing the datum shift results and what PC-DMIS was doing to me. The Datum shift results is something that needs to come back.
I've been told that Hexagon is actively thinking of how to bring this information back for end users. Currently, the GD&T library does not output the exact results of the performed optimization so PC-DMIS simply doesn't have access to them. It's not a matter of just turning it on. I'm sure they'll find an appropriate way to provide this information in due time, but for now we'll just have to wait and work with what we have. I have faith in the software, current state, simply by taking a look at how detailed the help files are when discussing the Geometric Tolerance command.
