Origin’s latest release of its SOLIDWORKS add-in delivers powerful new productivity tools to the SOLIDWORKS community.
“Many companies see a need to improve the efficiency of Inspection but are put off by the perceived risks of model-based definition (MBD),” says Murray Desnoyer CEO of Origin. “And there’s demand to add inspection results to the manufacturing digital twin. For companies that need these solutions, we developed CheckMate 2019 for SOLIDWORKS.”
Automated CMM programming from drawings. The new Measure All feature analyzes the SOLIDWORKS CAD and converts all hole, cylinder and surface plane features it finds to measurements. This eliminates the repetition, and errors, of capturing common measurements from drawings. And inspection technicians get to focus on the more challenging measurements that only they can program.
“Every company has its own standards for measuring parts so Measure All built so companies can customize it to their standards,” says Desnoyer. Measurement defaults are input once, during setup. After that, each time the Measure All button is pushed in SOLIDWORKS, CheckMate refers to the defaults to generate feature measurements.
Inspection results added to the digital twin. CheckMate has added measurement results to the SOLIDWORKS file – and now it displays these results as part of the manufacturing digital twin. The tolerance condition of each feature is displayed graphically. “Leveraging this data which we’ve added to SOLIDWORKS CAD files is an extraordinarily efficient way to distribute time-sensitive inspection information,” says Desnoyer. Model faces are colored green (in tolerance), red (high), or blue (low).
Leverage CheckMate’s Programming productivity tools. The new features are fully-integrated with the powerful productivity of CheckMate Programming.
Graphic programming. This powerful tool enables inspection technicians to build multiple programs in seconds just by picking and clicking. This is incredibly powerful when building the inspection plan for assemblies that require multiple components, and in-process checks for each.
Program optimization. CheckMate analyzes the part and the measurements to develop an inspection program that will run in the least possible time – for over 50 different CMM makes, including Zeiss, Hexagon, Mitutoyo and more.
Bridge the gap to MBE and MBD. The big challenge of model based enterprise (MBE) and model based design (MBD) is the required process changes and new skills. “It’s seen as very risky to take all of this on at once” says Desnoyer. “We’ve found a way for companies to take a more gradual, engineering approach to MBD.” When designers want to make tests of MBD by applying a few annotations, CheckMate notices. For those measurements, CheckMate uses the MBD annotations instead of the Measure All defaults. This enables companies to begin to move by ordered stages into MBE as skills and processes are ramped up.
Measure All and Digital Twin are new features of their respective modules of CheckMate. So customers on Support can download and use the feature right away without incremental cost.
