Touch probe for CAD programming

3D laser scanner???

There are digitizing probes available but I haven't priced or researched them.

David

coyotebgone said:

Is there a way or supplier of a touch probe to expedite the programming of shapes in CAM. Example: If I wanted to copy the interior dimension of a bowl, can I do this will a probe and send data back to Fusion?

Thank you

Click to expand...

When you use a touch probe, you get back a “point cloud”, a bunch of X,Y,Z coordinate sets. Fusion 360 will not handle this directly. You will need other software to transform the point cloud into a format that fusion will accept. I think MeshLab will handle the conversion, then you can use Meshmixer to edit and finally import into fusion as an STL. Not trivial, but not impossible, and luckily these are free software programs.

Scanning with a probe can take quite some time, depending on the resolution and size of item you are scanning.

coyotebgone said:

Is there a way or supplier of a touch probe to expedite the programming of shapes in CAM. Example: If I wanted to copy the interior dimension of a bowl, can I do this will a probe and send data back to Fusion?

Thank you

Click to expand...

In Mach3 there is a Wizard utility called COPYCAT using a webcam to do that.
I bought the wizards add-on so I cannot say whether you need license to use it or not. But the wizard add-on for Mach3 is cheap.