Centroid Community CNC Support Forum

Hello, we have recently purchased Acorn board and have been setting it up for a while, did some test runs and it's just wonderful.

The problem is that we work with large parts (all up to 6 x 2 meters) which we want to digitize (100 parts or more) at lower resolution but still get all the corners/contours nice and clean.

All the parts are only needed in 2d (wall following). If I set resolution at 1 mm, I get too much points to work with them in CAD and it takes too much time for the part to complete (it would take months to probe all of them). But if I set resolution too low (2 cm), the probe misses some of the corners and doesnt come back to trace them. As far as I know you can not set the distance to move/try to detect when you miss the surface. Any ideas how to still get all the corners right but not get too many points?

This is low quality scan with 20mm stepover (imported in Fusion 360): And the high quality scan, this is how the shape should look but it has too many points to work with (1000+) and this is ONLY 85 x 20 cm part:
I have come with some workarounds but am not sure how to implement them:

- solution 1: reduce 90% of useless points (straight lines only need 2 points instead of 100) and increase feedrate of probe
- solution 2 (better): I guess there should be something similar to corner probing when probe moves over the edge of surface. It should come back and probe in reverse until the last point's coordinates OR at least to set the limits of part so the probe can't go over the end of the surface.

The only thing I can do right now is to probe only complicated parts of surface and connect them in CAD but its really time consuming.

Any other ideas how to deal with this problem? Would experts at Centroid be able to implement this feature?
Thank you.

Manually digitize the 16 points needed, and recreate the part by hand. You could probably have that done in the time it takes to set up the digitizing routine.

tblough wrote: ↑Mon Jul 12, 2021 11:18 am Manually digitize the 16 points needed, and recreate the part by hand. You could probably have that done in the time it takes to set up the digitizing routine.

Well you are right, but other parts are much more complicated than this one and they have a lot of strange curves which have to fit perfectly, rather than correcting errors on every single radius on every surface it would be much easier to just get them all in first run. Especially with bigger parts.
The other thing is I wanted a simple method so others in our company will be able to digitize similar parts without needing to edit the model in CAD etc.

I think the alghoritm could be improved for corners like in this case.

That's the rub when digitizing large parts with a probe. If you're doing this on a regular basis, you might want to look at an optical solution. Otherwise, I would find a happy medium with resolution, like say .025-.05" and let it collect it all. Then bring it into CAD and put it on it's own layer. Then trace over it with fresh vectors. The corners are never going to be right anyway...just use the digitized data as a reference. Then you'll get crisp corners and as few intermediate nodes as you choose to put in. You have to redraw the part anyway so you might as well just let the probe do its thing and fix it in "post."