Lesson 4: Measuring Features and Aligning

00:11

To begin a measurement sequence, press the "Play All" icon in the Measure tab of the ribbon.

00:16

This will walk you through the inspection process for all unmeasured items in our currently selected group, in the same order as shown in the Inspection Tree.

00:25

We'll start by measuring the plane.

00:27

PowerInspect starts by informing us the minimum number of measurement points which need to be taken in order to accept the feature.

00:34

For a plane, it's best to always take at least four points, as this will give us information about its flatness.

00:42

Use your device type measurements on the top surface of the model.

00:46

When you have taken enough measurements, the PowerInspect screen will update to show the details of the feature being measured, and you'll be able to press the "Green Tick" to move on to the next feature.

00:60

To measure a circle, take a minimum of three points on the inner surface.

01:04

Be very careful to make sure that you're measuring the correct feature.

01:09

PowerInspect will indicate which features you should be measuring by highlighting it dark blue.

01:15

Once the first circle has been measured, press the "Accept" button once more to move on to the final circle feature.

01:22

You have measured all the features in the Inspection Sequence, press the "Green Tick" to return to the main graphics interface of PowerInspect.

01:30

The features you have just measured will now appear in purple in the graphics interface.

01:34

If you can see them, press the "Resize to Fit" button to view them all.

01:38

As you can see, inspection device and the CAD model are currently unaligned.

01:44

So, before we take any more measurements, we need to use these features to create our alignments.

01:49

Press the "Green Arrow" to move back into the main section of the Inspection Tree.

01:53

To create a new alignment, navigate to the Alignment and Datums tab of the ribbon and select "Geometric PLP".

02:02

Like the Feature Creation dialog box we saw earlier, here we can choose reference pieces of geometry to construct our alignment from.

02:10

As you can see, the dialog box is asking us for a plane, a line, and a point.

02:16

It has automatically selected our plane and points, but we need to select our constructed line from the dropdown menu.

02:22

We leave the rest of these settings as default and press "OK" to create our alignments.

02:28

Our purple measured features should automatically snap to the nominals of the CAD, and there should be a "green tick" on both the geometry group and the PLP alignments.

02:37

This indicates that all our features are within asset tolerance.

02:42

With our alignment created, we're now ready to start creating features.