Is this possible? Help Please!

[[Br...]]

Here is the situation, and how I hope PCM can be used to solve it. Currently engineering compiles the actuals from several CMM reports into a database for statistical analysis to see things like repeatability and tool wear. This is a tedious process as they must go through each report, and manually input them into the database to perform the analysis.

I would like to know if it is possible to use PCM to have the actuals from individual CMM runs compiled automatically into a singular location that is updated automatically based on the Serial Number of the part. For instance if I have successfully run SN 001-005, I would have a file that has the actuals for all 5 SN's sorted by characteristic. Further, if I was to run SN 006 and had some flags for out of tolerance, I would like to be able to run the part again, and have the file be able to see that SN 006 has already been run, so instead of adding another column for a duplicate SN 006, I would overwrite the column that already has SN 006.

Is this possible with PCM, how would I go about doing something like this? I really appreciate any help you guys can offer as im not sure how to even start!!

[[No...]]

Basically you can write every type of ASCII file with PCM if you use the right sequence of commands (the addToFile command writes (appends) to an ASCII file). But there's no ready-made solution for your situation. Instead you have to build the file yourself line by line.

The column replacement part would be rather tricky, as addToFile just appends text to the end of a file. Unfortunately there's no counterpart that would read or even modify a file in place, but you can use readListFile to read an ASCII file into a so-called list where each line of text represents a list element. Then you can analyze the list with the command getParameterNamed(list, item_no).

With these commands and some programming skills you should be able to achive your goal, but it won't be a simple 5-line program.

You might want to check out the merge table file in Calypso. With it you can collect measurements from different runs in a single table file. No replacement option here, but maybe it's easier to process such a file in Excel than to write a complex PCM program from scratch.

[[Mi...]]

Your company needs to buy software to do this, reinventing a wheel that's already been invented many times is a waste of resources.

Zeiss has PiWeb.
ProLink has Real-time
There's untold numbers of text file merging softwares that do different things to be more or less useful.

[[Je...]]

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This is all handled by PiWeb natively already. Every requirement you describe is handled already by PiWeb Reporting (even the basic unlicensed version) Trend report templates handle 99% of this without added modification. PCM is not necessary here at all.

[[Ma...]]

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Hi

Like everyone else i can only recommend PiWeb for this task.

Second you can activate you in you programs the txt protocols where you get for every measurement 3 files (name_hdr.txt; name_chr.txt; name_fet.txt)
These files have all as delimiter an "tabulator" so your database guy should be able to write a simple import script for these.

I use MS excel to load all txt files (_hdr.txt and _chr.txt) in a specific folder the same way.
The _hdr.txt contains the part-ID and your part information name version etc.
The _chr.txt contains the part-ID and your measurement results (actuals; nominals etc.)

[[Ri...]]

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You can have Calypso create an Excel file for every part.
The data is organized the same way for every part.
Want to run SN-006 again, change the Incremental par Number to SN-006.

Some Part_3547.xls

[[Al...]]

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Other options are just the Multiple Reporting features in Calypso. You can output Excel files and Text Files already. I would suggest getting used to using the Calypso Help File (F1), there is a wealth of information in all the help files as well. You can research reporting in Calypso and PiWeb that should give you 100% of what you're looking for. I would bet the engineers have a system in place that they are too stubborn to want to change it, so my suggestion would be to set up the automatic Excel save in calypso and they can pull the data they want from that. However, I would personally put a PiWeb report together showing the power behind it and how you can visually see trends and calculate anything you want from your data, including repeatability. Tool wear is an interesting thing to track because it requires that you check parts in a sequential order (usually 100%) or your data won't mean anything.