Investigation of CIM setups

www.acronymfinder.com lists 67 meanings for CIM. Which one were you interested in?

the meaning of CIM is Computer-Integrated Manufacturing for me.

and thank you for your response

Your intention seems to be to computerize a manual hardness tester.

I would be amazed if commercial products are not available yet but cost may be a limiting factor.

I am a DIY fanatic and it is usually found that existing equipment can be modified easily at a fraction of the cost.

Most manual adjustments can be achieved by replacing a winder (handwheel) by a stepper motor. The movement can then be achieved with pulses from the computer. In this case the parallel printer could be used to control up tom 4 steppers.

Reading results into the computer can also be achieved. There is a wide range of equipment and options available.

For a start a games port can be used for development purposes. A dual port can handle 4 limit switches and 4 analogue inputs.

Note Not accurate and reliable enough. But it can assist in the design of proper tools.

A Rockwell Hardness Tester being modified to a HMI desplay instead of a digital on unit display aswell as an auto-feed with a Bar code printer on sample ( I digress) just some thoughts on your topic!

Thats the direction I was going as well.

Of course it depends on af ew things. One of which is; are your samples going to be uniform in Height? If so (and even if not) a fully mechanized and automated measuring and data acqusition station should not be too difficult if not already available. Using any impact type system (not just Rockwell).

with a bit more effort. An impact indentation 'might' be able to be coupled with a profilometer and translated to desired analysis criteria if needed at micro or near micro level analysis

If you are measuring in the nano range, forget I was ever here.