Video: Measurlink Mitutoyo–Derived Characteristics in MeasurLink Data Collection

Drew Klaber: Hi, I'm Drew Klaber with Mitutoyo America Corporation. I'm here with Jeremy Banks who is our national data management Sales Specialist and today we're going to be talking about derived characteristics and MeasurLink. So Jeremy, I've run across a few applications lately where a customer may have a part that they're measuring and they're doing a couple, let's say diameter measurements, and once these measurements are done they'll get the calculator out and figure out maybe an average or maybe they're doing maximizer, there's an additional calculation that they're doing. Is there a way that we can just have MeasurLink automatically do that calculation for us?

Jeremy Banks: Yes, so there's a function of measurement called derived characteristics and I'll show you how to set that up so we can do an average. So during your example, the customers measure in this diameter and x and y so for example and measure the diameter x and then I'm going to rotate the part and measure the diameter Y and then your customers are required to average those two readings get a third characteristic.

Drew: Correct.

Jeremy: Okay, so let me show you how to set that up. So Drew, the first thing I need to do is create my derived characteristic. Now this is going to be average, so inside of my part library I'm going to add a new characteristic and I'm going to call it average and I'm going to change it from a variable to a derived.

Drew: So derived meaning it will automatically calculate correct?

Jeremy: Correct. So I'm going to click off and I'm gonna click back on average and now I can see that I have an equation tab. Now I'm going to build the equation for average. You always have to start with the characteristic name that's very simple to do. I'm just going to select it in this list of characteristics by double-clicking. Now down here at the bottom in the code. I'm going to build an equation. Now the equation for average is basically diameter x plus diameter y divided by 2. So I'm going to go ahead and enter that in. I'm going to select parentheses with the keyboard and then double click on diameter X hit the plus sign and a space and then double click on diameter y. I'm going to close that with the parentheses and then I'm going to add divided by 2. I'm going to finish the whole thing off with a semicolon.

Now down at the bottom I'm going to hit the Save button. This will automatically check the equation that I've just written in. If I've had any problems, a dialog box will appear and tell me what my problem is. I'm satisfied with this, I'm now going to copy this characteristic from my part library into my routine library. So I'm going to click on average and then I'm going to click and drag it down to the routine library tab back up to my tree and then drop it onto average. The characteristics automatically added to the average routine and at this point I can see that the DAQ source has automatically been mapped to calculator. I'm going to go ahead and hit Save and I can click Create Run so I'm back in real time and I can see that I have my original characteristics for diameter x and diameter y but I do not have my characteristic for average. I need to add that so I'm going to go to the 2D View tab and click on create. I'm going to click and drag average onto the screen. Now I'm going to make it look the same as the others by using my Apply to All and Tile function. So now Drew, as I measure diameter X and then diameter y, the average is automatically calculated.

Drew: That's pretty simple to do. So aside from averaging, are there other calculations that we can do?

Jeremy: Well yeah, basically any mathematical formula that anybody normally would do by hand or in Excel, we can create a derived characteristic to do that.

Drew: Very cool. Thank you again for your time, thank you for your time as well. If you have suggestions for future tool tip videos, please feel free to leave those in the comments below or if you have additional questions, please feel free to give us a call at 888-MITUTOYO or visit us online at www.mitutoyo.com.