Hi Eric-
I just recently discovered ProbeIt, I've been on this forum for a couple years now since I converted to UCCNC, not sure why it took me so long to catch on! This is a great tool for me, I've done a lot of reverse engineering on plastic injection molds over the years, but a year ago I changed jobs and left behind a real Starrett CMM that I miss as I used it very frequently. Looks to me like ProbeIt will be able to fill in a fair amount of functionality that I've been missing since then so I'm looking forward to finding out how well it will work for me. I have a couple of questions for you:
1. Since installing the demo it's been counting down 20 days (down to about 17 now), I read other places that you had changed the demo length to 60 days so I'm confused. I'm not sure 20 days is going to be long enough for me--I recently sold to my current employer one of a pair of small industrial 3 axis mills I had done a complete rebuild on, the other one I am in the process of rebuilding so it's not running--all this to say that the amount of time I get on the working mill to test ProbeIt is very limited. 60 days would be much better than 20 obviously, so I would appreciate clarification on this.
2. I'd like to get your comments on an issue I've been thinking about and wondering if I'm overthinking it or not. On the CMM during calibration the probe is calibrated in full 3 dimensions, that is, the effective diameter is taken into account in full 3d space. ProbeIt's calibration only works on the XY plane and so in my mind the effective diameter is not really true, it's more of an egg shaped probed then. Or is it? For example, my probe is exactly 0.125" diameter but when I calibrate it the effective diameter is 0.118", so is the distance from the tip of the probe still 0.0625" or 0.059", and is there going to be an error of 0.0035" when probing in XZ or YZ? Of course at the tip the Z depth would be true, and any probing exactly at the center would be true, but what about everything in between? Like I said maybe I'm just overthinking it but I would appreciate hearing your thoughts (or other forum members') on this. I'm sure that amount of error is not a concern to some but for moldmaking it's fairly significant.
Parenthetically, before using ProbeIt to calibrate the probe, I had probed a 1-2-3 block to acquire the effective diameter in using UCCNC's probe utilities and came up with exactly the same value as ProbeIt did to 3 decimal places, so it was nice to have 2 different methods confirm each other, it gives me confidence that ProbeIt is going to be accurate.
Overall I really like what I'm seeing and look forward to running it through its paces--at this point I'm pretty sure it's a buy, probably two licenses once I get my other mill running, and considering the reasonable price maybe the demo length is not that much of an issue.
Thanks for putting out a great utility, it's obvious that you're pretty meticulous about your work and it's always great to work with a developer as responsive as you seem to be (something I really appreciate about CNCDrive as well).
Dan Hanger