This Tech Tip Video from CMMXYZ is an extended look at the ClearanceCube in PC-DMIS.
Welcome to another edition of tech tips from cmmxyz.com. In this episode, we will discuss how to use a clearance cube. Clearance cubes are a powerful and simple way to automate the safety moves for your probe around the part. To activate the clearance cube, click the ClearanceCube icon on the Quick Measure toolbar.
By default, the first time you use clearance cubes in a program, the ClearanceCube Definition Window will open in simple mode. Simple mode allows you to set a generic offset for the cube and it has options to show or hide the clearance cube, an option to manually resize the clearance cube, and an option to activate or deactivate the clearance cube.
The easiest way to use clearance cubes is to activate the clearance cube once your manual alignment has been completed and you've turned on DCC mode. Any new feature created with the clearance cube active is automatically added to the list of features to utilize the clearance cube. If we click on the Advanced button, and make sure the Status tab is selected, we see a list of every feature in our program. We also have a list of features that are active for the clearance cube set to On, or features that are not active for the clearance cube set to Off.
At this point in the program with about three features left to go, I've remembered that I forgot to turn on the clearance cube. So I activated the clearance cube at this part of the program and my remaining three features were set to On automatically. The rest of my program, however, is set to Off. I need to set these features to On so then they could be used in the clearance cube for safety moves. The simplest way to do this is to grab your first feature after your manual alignment, click and hold the mouse, and drag down till you highlight all the remaining features that are set to Off.
When you remove the mouse button, a menu pops up, giving me a choice under Active to turn it off or on. So if I click the On button, all these features now are set to On, meaning they will utilize the clearance cube for measurement. I'm gonna go ahead and click the Apply button to make sure it remembers this setting. One last thing I wanna point out before we activate the clearance cube is to click on the Constraints tab. And notice what we have for our Faces options, and our Edges options. You'll notice they all have checkmarks except for a few.
Under the Faces, the Z minimum is not checked, as well as when we're utilizing edges together on the part. Anything that has a minus Z listed is not checked. This is going under the assumption that you will have your part on the table, and the Z minus function would cause a collision of the probe smacking into the table. These could be turned on if your part is elevated and you need to move below the part. But by default, they're disabled to save your probe from smacking to the table and causing thousands of dollars of damage.
Now, to activate the clearance cube, I like using the simplest way, which is clicking the Simple button, modify my Offset value if necessary. If you wanna increase the value, you can hit the up arrow. You wanna decrease the value, you could hit the down arrow, or you can even type in the value if you wanna change it all together.
Place a nice check on Activate ClearanceCube Motion. And when I hit Okay, clearance cube is active for my entire program. Note, there is no command in the program anywhere that mentions anything about a clearance cube. This is because the clearance cube option is what we refer to as a global setting. Once it's turned on, it's on. And inside the status component of the clearance cube will list which features are gonna utilize the clearance cube.
Now that the clearance cube is activated and configured for my features, let's turn on the path lines to see the actual path PC-DMIS will take when measuring the part. Click on the View menu and select Path Lines. As you can see, PC-DMIS does a pretty good job of avoiding the part, and even has good clearance for any of the probe rotations.
The last thing I wanna focus on is these four points. Notice, after each point is taken, it uses the clearance cube to move between the points. In this case, it is not really necessary to use the clearance cube as there's already good clearance point to point. Let me show you how to disable the clearance cube moves for these features.
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