Importing CAD Files

00:04

I'm now going to show you how to work with CAD models and describe the main tab controls used in the creation of inspection programs.

00:13

PowerInspect has a simple ribbon-style interface where controls and features are intuitively grouped together.

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The icons and dynamic help are designed to give the best possible user experience, drastically reducing the learning curve.

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CAD files created in a wide variety of formats can be imported by simply dragging and dropping them into the CAD view display area.

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This action also creates a new inspection document.

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Alternatively, we can use the CAD tab to add CAD files to the inspection document.

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Areas we do not want to use in the inspection can be hidden from the CAD view, excluded from the inspection projection and excluded from the collision detection.

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The View tab allows configuration of the CAD display area.

01:03

Here, we can change the shading mode of the CAD.

01:06

Shaded Wireframe mode is ideal for picking visible geometry and form alike.

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Whereas unshaded mode allows us to pick geometry that would otherwise be hidden.

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On this tab, we can also change the view direction, which labels are displayed, and set the mouse controls for zoom, pan, and rotate.

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To obtain meaningful measurements, we need to align the coordinate system of the inspection device with that of the CAD file.

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This is necessary to ensure we report the measured features relative to a known datum of part, rather than the coordinate system of the measuring device.

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To create an inspection program to measure geometrical features such as holes, slots, spheres, rectangles, and lines, these can be found on the Geometry tab.

01:56

To measure the form of 3D surfaces, cut plane sections and edge extents, we would use the Form tab.

02:05

If we need to work with scanned point cloud data, the Point Cloud tab has all the tools you need to select, trim, filter, and project the point clouds.

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To quickly obtain dimensional information from geometric features, there's the simple Measures tab.

02:23

Here we can create multiple features in a single click or we can start measuring on a single button click of the wizard.