This is mainly a 3D surface digitizing routine (bed of nails type), but offers the following:
• Ability to define a perimeter that is used to filter probing areas to cover. Ability to Preview probing area, and define the probe areas as inside or outside of the perimeter. This can greatly reduce wasted probing time collecting points you don’t want or need.
• Ability to stop and re-start probing at a position and continue writing to the same file. Probing >100,000 points can take a long time, now you can break your probing up into several sessions, and restart if something stopped you in the middle of the run.
• Adaptive retracting. The probing routine doesn’t just probe from a set ‘safe Z’ plane height, but rather tracks as closely to the surface of the part as you choose, only retracting to a higher Z level when necessary. This is an attempt to speed up the probing.
• Ability to have the plugin send you an email (or a text if you set it up to email to a special address that forwards to your cell number). Now you don’t have to wonder if the probing has stalled or hit a snag, the plugin will notifiy you if it has an error or an EStop event occurs before the finish!
The output is a standard text file, with comma separated X,Y,Z points you can import into mesh lab, etc.
A few notes:
-The probing seems fairly robust, I think I've worked out the bugs and implemented a number of checks to stop if something goes awry, but test at your own risk
-If you set it up to email, I will tell you up front that your email server login/password are saved as plain text in the settings xml file. If you don't like that, don't set it up and use it, or better yet, setup a spare junk email address to use.
-The plotting of points gets ridiculously slow, so I'll be looking into alternative plotting in the future. I recommend turning 'update plot during probing' off if you have more than 25,000 points to probe, as it just slows the probing down.
-This is tested with UCCNC 1.2109, windows 7 (32 bit) and a UC300eth. Let me know if you have issues on your different setup.
- I've only tested this in 'INCHES' units, you will have to set all values for your default units if using metric.
-the attached 'sample' zip contains sample files for a project called 'spart001' and a project called 'quarter', to give an idea of the input and output files generated.
Comments and suggestions welcome, the plugin definitely needs some refinement to make it more user friendly.
Thanks
Eric
- spart001 rendered in meshlab
