Original Date: 11/03/1996
Revision Date: 01/18/2007

The Oak Ridge Y-12 Plant initiated a project in 1988 to automate inspection information. Participation was provided by a team comprised of personnel from the Development, Engineering, and Quality Services departments. The objective was to significantly improve coordinate measurement machine (CMM) programming performance by providing new computer tools that would use Y-12's production CAD system.

Two systems were delivered in 1990 the CimStation Inspection Module and the Automatically Programmed Metrology (APM) prototype. The CimStation module was developed by Silma, Inc. (Cupertino, CA) from specifications developed by Y-12 personnel. It is a graphics-based, off-line CMM programming system. Manually driven, it is not limited to a particular feature set and has no inspection intelligence. It graphically displays the CMM, the part, the probe, and any fixturing. A menu driven program creation and editing feature allows accurate program simulation prior to actual use on the shop floor.

The APM prototype is a semi-automated system for creating dimensional measurement interface specification (DMIS) part programs for the CMMs. Running a VAX computer with graphics terminals, the software is written as a module of ANVIL-5000 v1.2. It required 50K lines of code and was developed in-house by Y-12 personnel using PASCAL, FORTRAN, Assembler language and ANVIL interface kit. The "productionized" version of the prototype has been developed for a Unix-based workstation, adheres to Motif user interface guidelines, and is intended to be external to any CAD system. It has been rewritten using C++, a fourth generation of object-oriented program language and consists of three separate modules: