New version of ZScan, the software for ZScanner 3D scanners.

Z Corporation announced the release ZScan 4.0, the latest software for ZScanner line of handheld, 3D scanners. ZScan can now integrate data acquired by a ZScanner 3D laser scanner and a contact probe or portable CMM in the same positional referential. From this new platform, it is now possible to create geometrical entities such as planes, lines, points, spheres, cylinders, or circles directly from scanning or probing data and in a single positional referential. These entities may then be saved in a format that allows direct exporting into most reverse engineering and CAD software (IGES).

ZScan 4.0 is fully compliant with Windows 7; both the 32 and 64 bit versions. ZScanner customers using Windows 7 no longer need to manually install the device drivers.

Integration of 3D Laser Scanning and CMM

ZScanner users can now integrate data acquired with their ZScanner 3D scanner and a contact probe on the end of a fixed arm or portable CMM in the same positional referential. The CMM can be used to locate key 3D features of the object such as circles, points, planes, cylinders, and spheres. These same features can be identified as 3D geometric primitives in ZScan through the Entities mode. The contact probe data can be exported in the IGES format and imported into ZScan to align the 3D laser scan to the contact probe data in the same positional reference. Combining the functions of a portable CMM with a ZScanner 3D laser scanner increases the number of possible applications in quality control, in engineering and several others.

Improved Graphics Display

Display graphics have been improved. The normal and un-normal views of the positioning targets are now differentiated. The targets appear as solid white-filled circles from the normal view, but when viewing the features from the un-normal angle, the features are displayed as a single line circle.

Improved algorithms

Many of today’s high-performance notebook PCs also come with hard-coded power saving settings. As users continue to demand desktop performance from their notebooks, the manufacturers have had to add a number of internal power saving settings. Internal settings may power-down certain functions of the computer that are necessary for proper operation of the scanner. For example, if a user is scanning for a continuous period of time, the PC may identify this as an "idle state" since no key strokes or mouse clicks have occurred and start powering down system host controllers, such as the Bushost controller for the firewire adapter slot. This causes the system to throw an INTERNAL ERROR message because the communication between the scanner and ZScan has been disrupted. Improvements in ZScan algorithms and the idle state power settings have addressed this situation.