Page Contents

Introduction

This page demonstrates hoe to configure WinCan VX and WinCan Map for the best results while making 3D Measurements using iPek equipment.

Paying attention to these items will prevent many frustrations during operations. In this description, we will only consider settings that are required to make 3D Measurement successful.

It should be remembered that WinCan Vx is a global solution that works in nearly 300 different inspection standards around the world and many different languages and territories, and they are all different, so there is seldom a one-size-fits-all solution for user settings. Hence why these need to be set by the user.

WinCan VX User Settings are saved, so they only need to be set once, but they must be reset after a clean software installation, or recovered from the backup settings.

WinCan VX makes a backup of the user data on the first launch each day, which is why it takes slightly longer to start up each morning. Where a new installation is made, these settings can be retrieved from the option in Tools → Backup → Restore → Restore from file.

WinCan VX User Settings

The WinCan VX User Settings are accessed from the Home → Settings menu option.

Don’t auto create laterals

By default, this setting is on, it should be turned off for this workflow.

Turning it off saves time at the end of a TV inspection because VX will prompt the user to create the laterals after the inspection closing (or abandoned) code is entered and all they need to do is click the green tick to complete the process.

This saves the need to explicitly click the Auto Create Laterals button in the Tools ribbon.

Section/Lateral Auto-naming

In many inspection standards in WinCan VX, the auto naming (how the asset ID of the section or lateral is constructed) is defined by the standard and is set in the template in VX. In these cases, the user cannot change the naming pattern and it does not matter what is set here.

However, for some standards (including many in the German speaking market), the standard is not set in the template, even though it is defined in the standard. This is because some users decide to do it a different way at the request of their customers.

So, it is critically important that it is now defined here. The pattern defined in the Isybau standard is ‘Upstream Node’ so the section/lateral ID is the same as the upstream node ID.

Further down, we have the system default naming pattern which by default is ‘Date and time stamp’. This is not needed if the main naming pattern is set, but if the user wishes to not set a default naming pattern, then they should reset this option to ‘8 character random string’ to avoid problems where multiple laterals created by the auto-create lateral tool have the same ID when they are created by the computer all in the same second.

3D Measurement

Here, we must select the correct measurement device and hit the green tick to confirm.

For some devices, it is also necessary to click the ‘Select start direction’ checkbox, but not for all and not for iPek.

Auto Create Connections Plugin

It is important to set these controls so that when the laterals are auto created, the nodes have the correct naming patterns for the selected inspection standard.

1. The naming pattern - set as required. For German standards, there are 2 options:

   1. DEU Isybau - Inspektionsrichtung - numbers the connection points and lateral upstream nodes numerically along the length of the inspection from the beginning, starting at 1.

   2. DEU Isybau - Fliessrichtung - similar to a, but always in a downstream direction, regardless of the way that the inspection was carried out by the operator.

2. For the Isybau standard, this must be set to ‘Use connection type’. For all other standards, use the default option ‘Use node type’.

3. Set the default inspection direction for system created laterals. For 3D measurement, this will usually be upstream, but there are other workflows that also use this tool, where it would be normal to set it to downstream.

4. if the coordinates of both of the nodes connected to the lateral are known, then we can automatically assign their geometric length in either full 3D or XY plane only 2D. Full 3D works very well when you have excellent 3D geometric data, but it can also cause problems when the data is not so good, maybe where some nodes have good Z values and some have it not defined. Using the 2D length is a safer option, but maybe slightly less accurate. The 3D option will give more accurate results, but will give really wild results where the data is bad.

View Profile

In order to display the 3D Wizard for this workflow, we must set the VX main window view theme:

Once it is set, it will be remembered.

If the 3D Measurement panel is not visible, it can usually be reactivated by clicking on the ‘Show Hidden Windows’ button in the Views ribbon bar like this:

WinCan VX Project Tips

Setting the Coordinate System

When a new WinCan project is created, user can set the required coordinate system here before the first time WinCan Map is opened for the current project:

The list of coordinate systems available here is filtered to the country of the current project, so this works for all countries that have coordinate systems defined in the background file. This file can easily be updated with new coordinate systems if required.

Setting it here will mean it does not need to be set when you launch Map for the first time with this project.

See also in this image that the project auto naming is set for this project. If it says ‘None’ here, then we can expect there to be some problems with the data and this should be addressed.

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