Sounds feasible
Any free cad that does this ?
Printable View
Draftsight does, its what I use to do drawings of RC planes.
Good to know there's a freebie option, I use BobCAD-CAM V25 for 2.5D, 3D & 4-Axis stuff so I bought the art package with a view to engraving work, it turned out to be of more use for 2D part replication ;-)
- Nick
I remember something similar in the 80's, a bloke I know spent a bundle of money on a vinyl cutter and computer[they will never catch on].
I never took much notice of it, I was there when he did a van for a local motorbike shop; he drew a logo free hand with pencil and paper, then he went over it with a thing with a lens with cross hairs. I think he had to press a button at points and it created it on the screen.
Time, and software has moved on. With the quality of digital imaging now available, and with the advent of packages with a good "Trace" function capable of generating vector outlines from bit-mapped images, the time of "digitising tablets" for accurate generation of technical drawings is well past it's sell-by date.
Starting with a scanned image or photograph I use Photoshop for bit mapped image sizing, manipulation and processing then Illustrator for vinyl cutting vector art generation or Bob-Art for machining jobs.
The only potential problem when photographing parts is distortion of the image caused by short focal length lenses, and/or having the focal plane too close to the object, by using at least a 50mm lens with the focal plane at least 1m away for parts up to 100mm length the results are good. For larger parts hanging on a wall and using a telephoto lens from longer distance would make sense.
- Nick