Editor Note: The following article is by Ray Xing, a regular and valued contributor to CMM Quarterly. The content of his article are his opinion based on his vast experience and is not meant to be an endorsement of any software. CMM Quarterly does not endorse any particular software. The intent is to present all software and let the reader form his own opinion.

Mitutoyo

Mitutoyo used to rank at 3rd place after Hexagon and Zeiss all the time and I think they still share a big part of the market even after the export-controls violations back in 2006.

1, Mcosmos (Geopak-Win)

15 years ago, Geopak is one of the most popular software on many cmms and many cmm people including myself start their career from this software. Geopak was a very quick, straightforward application and almost can meet all non-cad inspection tasks. If I’m not mistaken the developer is from German Zeiss group. But it did take Mitutoyo a long time to finally find a good cad solution. Some of you might not know that they developed Cadmeasure (autocad based) years ago but wasn’t a good cad package at all. Mcosmos is much powerful yet user-friendly, even though it’s missing many features in my book but it definitely delivers a full inspection package. The major thing is this is a modal based software, which means you’re really running many mini applications like Geopak, 3D-tol, Statspak, Scanpak, Dmispak, etc…, vs. other software like PC-Dmis, Metrolog are truly one application.

2, Geomeasure

I actually prefer to use Geomeasure for programming because of its full coding functionality and good dmis compatibility. For cad work, the solution is to use an off-line package like Checkmate or the newer one, NewCastle Measurement, which is developed for Geomeasure so it’ll not only output dmis code but also write to geodmis directly and even better it’ll take in result file from Geomeasure for graphical reporting.

LK (now Nikon Metrology)

1, WinCmes

If you want to set up a part on cmm table and manually check some features then WinCmes provides the quickest way. One line of WinCmes code (with”/”as separator) can finish a 3-2-1 alignment and measure a few points or holes, which will occupy a full page of coding in most other software. And the beautiful thing about WinCmes is you can easily retrieve any line of code form history with your right mouse click. Once you put all these lines in a text file and change it to prg extension it becomes a WinCmes program. Therefore even this is old dos version application I’ll give it a high score.

2, LK-Dmis

This is a very pure dmis based software. The interface is straightforward but you won’t like it at all because it starts a new toolbar for each click so quickly you’ll get lost where you are. If you can create dmis code with other off-line package and use LK-Dmis to drive cmm to run the program it works well.

3, Camio Studio

Camio is a very nice cad package for cmm programming. I don’t see any other cmm software can export the cad model to other various other cad formats but Camio does (if you purchase the full package). So this is bonus because it works like a cad convertor. And it allows you to create some simple cad features like cylinders which will help a lot on offline programming if you only have a drawing. Fully dmis compatible and can be easily edited in text editor like UltraEdit.

To be continued …