Offline Programming for CMM in CATIA V5 by Dassault Systemes

Larry Kuehn of Adaptive demonstrates ability to offline program CMM in CATIA V5.

V5 CMM planner integrated CATIA v5 offline CMM programming solution with a heavy focus on model based inspection best practices. The software has ability to post-process to virtually any CMM native language. CMM Planner is designed by CMM programmers for CMM planning which makes this interface very intuitive, and extremely fast and powerful. The beauty of using V5 CMM is that your are eliminating translations and working with the native modeling site CATIA. You also have the ability to work inside CATIA assembly. We’ll start by opening it here model and start an inspection plan.

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Video Transcription

V5 CMM planner is an integrated CATIA v5 offline TMM programming solution with a heavy focus on model-based inspection best practices. The software has ability to post-process to virtually any CMM native language. CMM V5 planner is designed by CMM programmers for CMM planning, which makes this interface very intuitive and extremely fast and powerful.

The beauty of using V5 CMM is you are eliminating translations and working with the native modeling side of CATIA. You also have the ability to work inside a CATIA assembly.

We’ll start by opening a CATIA model and start an inspection plan. First, we copy the CAD part and place it into the workbench for inspection planner. Now we are inside a CAD product. We’re going to start a plan, we’re going to assign it a name, we’re going to pick the axis where we want our data coming from and we’re going to pick the alignment of the parts of the CMM which aligns the A&B angles.

So we created an inspection plan – the start of it.

What we have on our work bench is we have it set up as you use it—we have motion commands. We have Go to moves in pro changes to change the A/B angle. We have surface measurement on the bottom and we have whole measurement.

We also have inside the planner under Tools, Options we have a pro builder, where you can build your probe, and we have post processor settings for mirroring your programming and adding alignments and special routines inside DMS. So that’s built right inside CATIA.

So we’ll go back to the plan. We’ll give it a comment. We’ll inspect holes. We can give it some motion; we’re going to put the machine in DCC mode. We can import tolerances based on the drawing, model, other engineering specifications-it’s all going inside the plan. We can give it approach and retract, distance for the probe inside the whole. And then we’re also going to say that we want to lift out of the hole each time a hundred thousandths to avoid crashes.

So we have our start of our motion. Now we can start several ways – we can do go to moves, we can do a go to move at 005 that starts the pro. On the bottom like I said we’re going to measure holes so we can do 2D hole, put in a vector hole or like pilot hole or five axis hole. And all these holes have strategies where we can do auto holes, measure holes or PT measure holes, probe at one or three times around the hole and we have different strategies. So in this case we’re going to use a 2D strategy. We can name the hole so it can be called “Key Characteristic Hole,” and we can say what color we want to make the holes, what do we want for the appearance…we’re going to probe it four times at 30 thousandths and literally you just hover over the model, highlight the curve, we can inspect the hole.

Now if we were to put a clearance plane on above this rib we could have just measured all these without worrying about a collision. So we have a capability of putting clearance planes on.

For this demonstration we’ll just measure these few holes. All the holes are put into the plan and it puts the XYZ IJK, the diameter and probing strategy with the key names. At any time, you can turn on the name in the holes and this is used for creating road maps.

The other thing that I want to document is we put the data right in the CAD part so the data stored right in the CATIA model. This is truly working inside the CATIA environment.

Now we’ll show another way to do a go to move we can literally indicate on a plane so you get to use all the power of CATIA so you can literally indicate on a plane. So we’ll move the probe over to here and then we’ll work. We’re going to change the probe angle and we’ll go back to where the probe came from – to avoid collision. And we’ll demonstrate a few ways to create points. The easiest way is we can indicate points. We pick a surface and we can literally just indicate points. That’s a very common way for programmers to program when the coordinates are not exactly specified where needed.

Another way we can do this, and we’ll change the color, is we can put points along the UV grid so we want to put a 5×5, we can pick a surface and we literally can indicate points. Another really common way to put points is along a XY grid.  And we can do that if we want to put up a two-inch so every two inches along the Y and a quarter inch along the Z, and the equation would be 010 and 001 for the equation. We picked the surface, select the vector, we can do a preview and if we like what we see we can accept. So we’re putting those points – so it will on the Y and Z direction.

The beauty of this method is our points are all station cuts. So you can see every two inches it’s changing and why it’s gone from 16 to 18 in Y and it’s going up a quarter inch in Z. So those are exact engineering station cut type of points.

The other thing we can do is we can put points along the edge of the part. On a part like this you have to measure the periphery of the part. So we can come in here and say we want to put three points along the edge. We can pick this surface, pick the edge and say we want to drop down twenty-five thousandths so we can put points along the edge.

So again, all you do is pick the surface, set the vector, pick the edge and put points along the edge. So we can get around a part very fast by putting points along the edge. Pick the surface, set the vector, now we want to put maybe 10 points and then we could have reversed the direction of how we’re going- we have the capability of reversing direction. So after we program the part, and again you’d go all around the part and there’s a lot of things you could be programming on this, I just wanted to give you an example of how fast it is to do the holes and points, it would be time to post-process the data. So we can hit the post process button. We can pick many different popular PCD languages. And we want to put post that plan. We want to browse where we want to put it – we’ll call this CMM Plan 1.dms and we’ll post it out. What you get is we get a few files. We get the raw data hits inside CATIA. This is showing you where the data is coming from, our tolerances we put in, some of the motion, our names that we put in and the XYZIJK data. So this is our raw data, it comes from CATIA.

We also are getting an app source file. If we wanted to open this file inside CATIA and see simulation software like for NC milling or other DELMIA type of simulation, we could simulate this app source file – this mimics the exact hits that the DMS file’s taken so we can bring this inside other CATIA simulation workbenches and do full simulation collision detection.

The other file we’re getting is a DMS file. This is the file that the operator would align the part on the CMM, he would import DMS, he would hit the start button and the CMM would follow these rules and tolerances and the inspection points in holes, go to moves, pro changes, that he performed. All the information is stored right into the file. The beauty of this again is we’re doing it offline, we’re doing it to the native CATIA model – no translation, much faster, part associative, the DMS file is associative to the CATIA part. If the part changes the DMS file would be updated, the plan would be updated so it’s a great way to perform CMM programming on native CATIA models.

This will end the demonstration on V5 CMM Planner.