First article inspection in CNC Programming - Mini Project: Build & Apply

First Article Inspection Automation

📖 Scenario: You work in a manufacturing plant where CNC machines produce parts. Before starting full production, you must perform a First Article Inspection (FAI) to check if the parts meet quality standards.To help with this, you want to automate the process of recording measurements from the first batch of parts and flagging any measurements that fall outside acceptable limits.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple script that stores measurement data for parts, sets acceptable tolerance limits, checks which measurements are out of tolerance, and prints the results.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary with part names and their measured values

Add a tolerance limit variable for acceptable measurement range

Use a loop to check each part's measurement against the tolerance

Print the parts that fail inspection with their measured values

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Automating first article inspection helps manufacturing plants quickly identify parts that do not meet quality standards, saving time and reducing errors.

💼 Career

Quality engineers and CNC programmers use such scripts to ensure parts meet specifications before full production, improving product reliability.

1

Create the measurement data dictionary

Create a dictionary called measurements with these exact entries: 'PartA': 10.05, 'PartB': 9.98, 'PartC': 10.12, 'PartD': 9.95

CNC Programming

# Create the measurements dictionary with exact values
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces {} to create a dictionary with the exact part names and their measurement values.

2

Set the tolerance limit

Create a variable called tolerance and set it to 0.05 to represent the acceptable deviation from the target measurement.

CNC Programming

measurements = {'PartA': 10.05, 'PartB': 9.98, 'PartC': 10.12, 'PartD': 9.95}
# Set the tolerance limit variable
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a simple assignment to create the tolerance variable with the value 0.05.

3

Check measurements against tolerance

Use a for loop with variables part and value to iterate over measurements.items(). Inside the loop, check if the absolute difference between value and the target 10.0 is greater than tolerance. If so, add the part and value to a new dictionary called failures.

CNC Programming

measurements = {'PartA': 10.05, 'PartB': 9.98, 'PartC': 10.12, 'PartD': 9.95}
tolerance = 0.05
failures = {}
# Use a for loop to check each measurement against tolerance
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Start with an empty dictionary failures. Use a for loop to check each measurement. Use abs(value - 10.0) > tolerance to find out-of-tolerance parts.

4

Print the inspection results

Print the string "Failed parts:". Then print the failures dictionary to show which parts failed the inspection with their measured values.

CNC Programming

measurements = {'PartA': 10.05, 'PartB': 9.98, 'PartC': 10.12, 'PartD': 9.95}
tolerance = 0.05
failures = {}
for part, value in measurements.items():
    if abs(value - 10.0) > tolerance:
        failures[part] = value
# Print the failed parts dictionary
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use two print statements: one for the label and one for the failures dictionary.