Calibrating Probe Tips

Probe tips need to be calibrated before you can use them to measure the part. Calibration tells the software the position of a probe tip in 3-D space. Calibration involves the probe tip taking touches on a measurement sphere, called a "calibration tool". You should perform a probe calibration whenever your probing hardware changes, such as installing a new probe tip or when a calibrated tip grows stale.

With the Scheduler add-on, calibrations can be enforced according to a defined schedule. To do this, you need to use the Scheduler section of the Settings screen. If a probe tip calibration is out-of-date, Inspect cannot measure routines with that probe tip until someone recalibrates it. To prevent executions with uncalibrated tips, you can also use the Block Execution If Uncalibrated Tips option in the PC-DMIS section of the Settings screen.

This procedure tells you how to calibrate probe tips with the PC-DMIS Application add-on:

Connect the probe hardware that you want to calibrate (such as probe body, extension, and tip) to your CMM.

Attach your calibration tool to the CMM base plate.

Run Inspect.

Start the calibration process with one of these approaches:

Option 1) From the Details Pane

This calibrates all the tips that are in the measurement routine for the probe you select.

From the Home screen, select the tile for a measurement routine that contains the probe you want to calibrate.
Open the Details pane and go to the PC-DMIS area.
If you have not executed the routine in Inspect yet, then no probes are yet visible in the Details pane.

To detect the probes, either execute the routine at least once, or next to Used Probes, click the Probes Refresh button () to locate the probes.
Once you perform either operation, the list of probes appear under Used Probes.

If you have executed the routine once, then the Used Probes heading contains the routine's probe or probes.

Under Used Probes, locate the probe you want to want to calibrate.

Expand the drop-down list.
Click the Calibrate button ().

If you have more than one PC-DMIS version installed and configured to work with Inspect, a small dialog box with a list of PC-DMIS versions appears. Choose the PC-DMIS version you want to use to perform the calibration and click Accept.
PC-DMIS runs in the background and shows its Measure Probe dialog box.
Continue with Step 5 below.

Option 2) From the Settings Screen

This calibrates one or more tips that the probe uses.

In Inspect, access the Home screen. Then from the left sidebar, click Settings.
On the Settings screen, locate your PC-DMIS version (for example, PC-DMIS 2022.1).
Under that version, click Probe Calibrate to show an Open dialog box. (If this button is unavailable for selection, an administrator needs to enable this setting.)
From the Open dialog box, choose the probe file that matches the probe that you want to calibrate.
Click Open to show the PC-DMIS Probe Utilities dialog box with that probe.
Click Measure to show the PC-DMIS Measure Probe dialog box.

From the PC-DMIS Measure Probe dialog box, locate List of available tools. From that list, choose the calibration tool you'll use.

Fill out other options in the PC-DMIS Measure Probe dialog box as needed, and click Measure to start the calibration.

Follow any on-screen instructions or prompts to calibrate the probe tips.

Once the probe tips successfully calibrate, if you access a measurement routine that uses that probe, you can see the probe name, tips, and calibration date in the Details pane.

If you need help with either the Probe Utilities or the PC-DMIS Measure Probe dialog box, you can press F1 on these dialog boxes to open the PC-DMIS Help file. It may take a few seconds to open. Once the Help opens, on the Search tab, type "Calibrating Probe Tips" (include the quotes). Then press Enter to locate topics on calibrating probes in PC-DMIS.