Hi,

I just saw a video for the new Audi TDI Lemans Racer and in the video were clips of their digitizing machinery. What I saw next left me amazed! They were not taking single points and moving the probe and taking a point again, instead the probe was just following the surface and they had a display in the background showing the numbers change. They were also letting it follow the cylinder walls, and different ports in the engine.

My question is: does anyone know how they do this? Does it require a special combination of software/hardware? Is it possible for the average joe to get this working with a homemade probe?

Thanks

Sebastian

you can do what they are doing with a arm digitizer like a microscribe. The problem is it wont be very acurate and prone to humane error. I.E. lifting the probe off the surface and not even realizing it until you anilize the data in cad.

I think that the constant contact probes use some type of capactance sensor to monitor the force on the probe. The software tries to move the probe and keep the force on the probe constant. My guess is that the control system is pretty fancy and you will only see them on fancier CMMs.