For decades we were taught to believe that if you ever wanted to measure anything properly, you needed a CMM.  A couple of decades ago, portable arms were released and although they seemed novel,

A growing number of manufacturers are using new economical modular fixture systems to create rapid low-cost holding fixtures for CMM inspection. In today’s lean manufacturing environment, streamlining repetitive tasks is crucial.

This paper describes a novel, integrated micro manufacturing process utilizing combination wire electro discharge grinding (WEDG) technology and one pulse electro discharge (OPED), to fabricate micro spherical stylus tips for micro coordinate measuring machines (μ-CMM).

A request from one of our customers started me on this project. What they wanted to see was a “real time” statistical process control (SPC) program for their critical characteristics. So with that being the underlying emphasis, I consulted with my PC-DMIS colleagues on the best approach to doing this with the tools I have. I was able to utilize DATAPAGE to get the necessary end result. As stated at Wikipedia.com,

I’m encouraged to continue on my reviews on CMM software (part two) by the fact that my part one article was one of the most read articles on cmm quarterly. I believe people (no matter which software they’ve used) are interested to know how “other” cmm software works, better or worse.

A fool learns from their own mistakes, the wise learn from the mistakes of others…