Cad / freehand ?

[alboy]

well you can get digitisers but they are mucho expensive, see here. http://www.logicgroup.com/LogicTrace...FeVz2wodc7sDug

[graffian]

I bought a Wacom[cost 12 quid from the local paper] to do the shading in a logo I was painting on something, it worked pretty well but my lack of artisticness showed. Since I have the tablet I have seen posts about using them for CAD, not that I have tried. I think people use slightly larger and newer ones than mine. Mine just has the two buttons on the pen, but I gather some have a menu area on them. With the Wacom I could draw lines far better than I could with a mouse, and I could vary the line width if I wanted.
I get shapes like manifold flanges into the pc by tracing them on white paper with a fine pen and after scanning them I draw over the TIF in cad. I did try the livetrace option in illustrator, I found it slower.

[njhussey]

I looked into the same thing a while back as I wanted to get an RC plane plan and put it on a surface and trace over the outlines etc with the mouse/puck. I remember back in the late 80's early 90's being at uni and using a tablet and puck for cad....on a Commadore 64. There are tablets out there but as been said their blinking expensive!

[dudz]

Maybe I will wait until all the existing technology inc 3d scanners come down in price......maybe 5 years from now

[magicniner]

Maybe I will wait until all the existing technology inc 3d scanners come down in price......maybe 5 years from now

Or you could scan or photograph it, resize the image appropriately, then import the image into a CAD program, from there it's quite quick to create an accurate drawing,

- Nick

[dudz]

Or you could scan or photograph it, resize the image appropriately, then import the image into a CAD program, from there it's quite quick to create an accurate drawing,

- Nick

Sounds feasible
Any free cad that does this ?

[graffian]

I looked into the same thing a while back as I wanted to get an RC plane plan and put it on a surface and trace over the outlines etc with the mouse/puck. I remember back in the late 80's early 90's being at uni and using a tablet and puck for cad....on a Commadore 64. There are tablets out there but as been said their blinking expensive!

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.

[magicniner]

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