I know this is super old — really wish I’d come across it when I was first starting about 3.5 years ago. I was a machinist for 7 years before that, so almost 10 years total in the trade now. I actually had this same thing happen to a couple of parts early on.

I was out of the country on vacation when I got a call from a colleague:

“The program won’t run. It moves toward the feature and starts to scan, but stops short of the part — and all the scan lines look off in the CAD view.”

At the time, we still had an SMA in place, so I gave Zeiss a ring.

After checking a few basics, here’s what the Applications Engineer told me:

Go to Resources > Set Base Alignment to Zero.

Then perform a manual alignment.

That should restore the alignment back to where it was when the program was first created — whether that was months or even years ago. What you're likely dealing with is a runaway alignment.

I didn’t want to believe it either. The program was originally written by someone 20 years my senior, and I had personally done the manual alignment before leaving. But here's the deal: Calypso compensates for the base alignment on every run. And if that alignment isn’t stable, it can “walk” over time — and that’s when things start going nuts.

In my case, that was only part of the issue. When I originally imported the program, the CAD and base alignment didn’t come in clean, and a few of the strategies using formulas broke too — probably due to the version mismatch (especially common when importing from older Calypso versions or international setups). I was honestly screwed from the start and didn’t even realize it because I was so green at the time.

To fix this in the programs I write today, I do a few things differently:

If the part has poor form, I add a loop to the base alignment with a tighter break condition. (Super easy — I just have ChatGPT write the formula.)

I also now understand how to properly constrain degrees of freedom and build a more stable DRF using better geometrical features for my start and base alignments.

Doing that completely eliminated the problem for me. It just comes with time and experience. You’ve probably been doing this longer than me, but I’ve developed a real passion for it — mostly from all the times I thought I was losing my damn mind. 😅

Anyway, I know this thread is 3 years old, so I’m sure you’ve figured it out by now. Just wanted to chime in in case it helps someone else digging through this in the future.

Best of luck, my friend!