The unit was launched at this year's EuroBlech 2008 exhibition in Germany attended by Maxitec's Andrew Bentrup, who believes the impact this Optical Probe will have in Australia will be immense.

"We have been the exclusive distributor in Australia and New Zealand of InspecVision scanning equipment which has helped even the smaller fabricators gain world class equipment for engineering and re-engineering," said Mr Bentrup.

"Once again, this inventive company has developed affordable technology to save time and money, increase accuracy during manufacture, and has done it without charging the earth.

"Even better is that this Optical Probe will be retrofittable to many existing InspecVision parts inspection systems owned by companies in Australia and New Zealand."

The accuracy of this Optical Probe option will be approximately 50 to 100 microns depending on the Planar model and the maximum possible measuring volume will be greater than 1m3, depending on Planar model.

The Optical Probe is a hand held device with optical markers fixed to its upper surface.  These markers are tracked by the camera and the 3D location of the probe is then calculated.

Measurements of an object can be made by simply touching the object and pressing the probe's trigger.

Not only does it measure any 3D part, it can reverse engineer as well and works well with all mainstream CAD formats.

It allows rapid alignment even for very complex freeform shapes and provides the ability to inspect along the edge of a part as well as full geometric inspection capabilities.

Other advantages include:

· Automatic creation of inspection features from CAD nominals

· A step by step geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) wizard

· Point, wireframe and surface export for measured entities

· CAD manipulation - including surface offsetting (such as reverse side for sheet metal, spark gap for electrodes)

www.maxitec.com.au