Hi, I'm Drew Klaber of Mitutoyo America Corporation.
Thank you for watching today's Tool Tip I'm here, Jeremy Banks.
Jeremy is also with Mitutoyo America.
And today, one of the things we're going to be talking about are ways
to reduce the misuse of your indicators.
And Jeremy has some experience for this coming from a manufacturing background.
And Jeremy I wondering if you could tell me a little bit more.
So today we're going to talk about the function lock on the IDC indicator.
So here you see we have our calculation type IDC indicator.
It's a high function, high accuracy indicator.
A very simple function that it has is Inch/Metric conversion.
So all we have to do is hold down the Inch/Metric button
to toggle between inch and metric.
Now, this is a great function, but unfortunately,
you don't necessarily want the operators to be changing this
in the middle of a setup.
If your drawing is dimensioned in millimeters, you don't want them switching
to inch accidentally, right? Right.
So even though it's a very convenient
that all you have to do is hold down the button.
It also makes it easy to be misused.
So what can we do to reduce that misuse?
Well, inside our new IDC indicators, we have a function lock.
So I'm going to go ahead and toggle through it.
So I'm going to press Menu.
That brings up my different options.
I'm going to go ahead and toggle all the way down to lock.
Then I'm simply going to turn it on.
Now that it is on,
no matter how long I hold down
the Inch/Metric button, it will not transfer over. Great.
So the only way you can undo that is to go through the same steps, to turn it
back off the same way that you turned it on. Exactly.
So you'd have to go back through the menu
settings back to function lock and then turn it on.
So is it only for the Inch/Metric button?
No. All the functions in the indicator can be turned on or off.
TIR, min/max, the preset, the zero function.
All of them can be turned off.
So this is great.
What if you encounter a situation where maybe you need
an additional layer of security?
Something where I don't want to just have to go in through a menu
on the indicator to change that lock in, lock out ability.
Are there any other options available?
Right. Obviously, if I can lock it out, then someone else can unlock it.
So we actually have a free software that you would connect to the IDC indicator.
And you can control every function
in the indicator from its Inch/Metric to the actual preset values.
TIR, max or min, all of those functions could be individually locked out.
Then you would actually need the software to unlock it, so. Oh, great. Yeah.
So the operator wouldn't be able to, with keystrokes, change the settings.
So they would actually have to use the software to go on and undo anything
that includes presets, inch, or metric.
Any button that's on here, any feature that's available. Yes. Very good.
Now, of course, the software is free.
There is a connection cable that needs to be purchased.
Benefits of that, though, is you only need one connection, cable.
So you can have 100 indicators just by the one cable
and you can take care of everything in your factory. Really?
So what if what if I have five indicators,
but each one is configured a little differently?
Well, inside the software, you have the ability to save configurations.
Just like saving a file? Just like saving a file.
So if you had 20 or 30 bore gages
and you could set the bore gage configuration file,
and then if you had a max/min indicator
or if you had an inline TIR, you could set those different condition files.
So if you're a lab manager,
somebody that is responsible just for maintaining these.
Really, once you set up one of these, it's going to be very,
very time advantageous to set up the others.
All you got to do is take your new, your new indicator out of the box.
Plug into that cable.
Load up the software, load your config file, save it and you're up and running.
Same cable for all indicators? Same cable for all the indicators.
That's a big help. Well, Jeremy, thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it.
Thank you for your time today and for watching this, this Tool Tip.
If you have any suggestions for other Tool Tips,
please leave them in the comments below. Again, thank you for your time.
Have a great day.