WCS Probing

[istan]

Does PM also support WCS probing, like e.g. Fusion does?

https://help.autodesk.com/view/fusion360/ENU/?guid=GUID-61123A95-8828-4214-A8FE-5A4DD1C2EE4F 

[Sean571]

No it doesn't. It only supports surface inspection, and even then you can't view the inspection results directly in powermill. 

You could in theory make a macro to help facilitate and make it easier to manually write WCS probing routines, but it'd be quite a lot of work and you'd need to be pretty experienced in the macro/probing language to get it functional.

You can also heavily modify a post to prompt you for various bits of info like stock size, probing routine to use and such and then output the needed code, but there's no user interface that would make it easy. Again this could only be done by someone experienced with editing posts and is a fair bit of work to set up and still isn't as smooth as it is in fusion. 

[istan]

Thanks for your answer.

But this sounds like a show stopper in using this software for real production.

PS: Is there probably a 3rd party tool supporting it?

[smackayPFSC4]

We use "text blocks" for probing. Using Renishaw's inspection+ macros. 
We do some pretty elaborate setups with castings on 5 axis machines, where the ending results are compound angles. A bit of Fanuc MacroB knowledge is required.

 I've yet to see any software that will do this for us. We keep Renishaw code snippets to copy/paste in to text blocks. 

For simple pickups, it's just a few lines of code added to a text block, like picking up the center of some rough saw stock.

[istan]

---

@smackayPFSC4 wrote:

We use "text blocks" for probing. Using Renishaw's inspection+ macros.

---

Thanks.

We also some semi-automatic (useless time waste) stuff on the machine itself.

IMHO such an expensive software like PM should have this on board as a standard feature, which btw exists on machines for decades (even on hobby types). Especially on 5 axis machines it is a must have.