Re: digitizer probe and software

Hi Fred,

I looked at the Picza, nice machine! Thanks for the comments and
explanations.

On the XYZ's the Vector CAD/CAM 9.3 can generate; Does that assume that
the DXF data is EVENLY spaced (on "the grid")? a MaxNC digitizer scan
will have fairly even spacing if the depth remains the same, but will
add more "sample points" if it finds an edge. Great for "copy", might
be hard to convert to XYZ?

Fred Smith wrote:

> <snip>
>
> If you scan a lot of points in a row, Vector can draw a spline
> through them. I did quite a bit of work with these, as I was working
> on a routine to get Picza scanned DXf files imported into Vector and
> Bobcad. the Picza format is 3D faces. These are the same basic form
> as the triangles in an STL file, and in fact StlTrans converts
> between the two file formats. Bear in mind that the picza uses a
> needle and a piezo electric pickup to scan the surface form. It does
> not use a 1/4 diameter ball for contact measurement. I wrote a VB
> program to turn the Picza data into a series of rasterized lines in
> Vector. Very similar to the lines that you are getting from the
> MaxNC scans. By playing with the selections, I de-select the end
> connections. This has the effect of selecting a series of parallel
> but planar curves, not a series of interconnected curves. Vector can
> offset any 3D planar curve (it was hopeless in Bobcad 16 and 17 as
> they did not have good enough control over chaining and selecting
> operations)
>
> <snip>
> By the way, My Vector 9.3 is still running on Win-XP, 1.4 GHZ Athlon.
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Fred Smith
> IMService
>
>

1.4 GHZ? I'm trying to get past 400 MHz!

Alan KM6VV