CAD - Custom Applications

		Custom Applications

	What benefits do you get from custom tailored applications with AutoCAD? -Protect your investment -Make difficult tasks easy -Do long, repetitive tasks quickly -Standardize the quality of your engineering documentation Protect Your Investment Of all the reasons to prepare custom applications, this is the most compelling. It encompasses all the other reasons in one way or another. Over the course of your business activities, you and your staff develop many design and drafting solutions specific to your work. Your design documents may reflect years of effort by skilled personnel with expertise in your field. If one of your key technicians suddenly left your employ, would the rest of your team be able to fill his shoes, or train his replacement to continue producing work of the same caliber? This knowledge is an intangible asset to your company. Unless you document and capture it while these people are with you, it will disappear when they move on. Preserving their solutions within well documented programs will make their expertise available to your entire staff at all times, including the days after the departure of the methods' inventor. People come and go, but the expertise, techniques and knowledge that they developed for you should stay. You've paid for it. Make Difficult Tasks Easy Draw a perfect seven-sided polygon in AutoCAD without using the POLYGON command. Make a renderable sphere without using the SPHERE or 3D/Sphere commands. Then calculate the surface areas of these entities without using the AREA or MASSPROP commands. AutoCAD goes a long way in making these complex tasks easy. However, it can't design stair risers and treads. Nor does it have a helix entity that can be used for springs or threaded fasteners. AutoCAD doesn't have any wood-grain hatches, and it can't create a set of topographical lines to show map elevations. This is all still possible in AutoCAD. Even though it doesn't include every conceivable command or drawing object, its powerful set of programming tools allows us to add these features ourselves. If you have a method to create a representation of your projects in AutoCAD, that method can be automated with a program. Once your procedure has been captured, you don't have to remember all of the difficult steps involved; the program will guide you through your work. Do Long, Repetitive Tasks Quickly Imagine a list of 1500 coordinate points collected by a laser survey system. At 15 seconds per point, it would take about 6 hours to read and create a point in an AutoCAD drawing for each one. This is a tedious and error prone job, and how would one ever find all the errors in this mass of data? We have written a simple AutoLISP program to do this in a few seconds, with zero errors! To separate those points onto different layers according to their elevation, you'd have to LIST a point, decide its layer, then change it, 1500 times. It would take another 6 hours to do this tedious job. We have written a second AutoLISP program that accomplishes the task in under 30 seconds. These two examples are not difficult, but they are time consuming. The two AutoLISP routines in Mrz_Points.lsp were written in less than an hour, and accomplish them both in under 45 seconds, with no deviation from the supplied data. Download the AutoLISP and points data files and try them yourself. Standardize Your Engineering Documentation To make the best widget in the world, every widget must be of the same high quality. How do you achieve this if widgets are created by any of several people with different skills? Each person must have equal access to the same production tools. Your engineering drawings are one of your company's products. Tailor made software can help produce drawings and documents that are consistent in look and feel and in quality of content. Your clients will more effectively understand your blueprints and Bills of Materials if they are always laid out in identical fashion. Your contractors and tradesmen will absorb information better and quicker if all the construction drawings are in a standard, familiar arrangement. Custom programs help to standardize your engineering documentation by giving everyone easy access to the same techniques and standard components.
	Methods of Programming AutoCAD
	There are several ways to improve and expand your installation of AutoCAD. The list below goes from the simplest to the most complex: - Customized menus and toolbars with your favorite commands - Simple macros that execute several commands sequentially with one menu pick - Automated procedures (this type can go far beyond the simple task of executing batches of simple commands in sequence) - Procedures to create custom entities (e.g. custom hatches and linetypes, intelligent objects) These approaches can be mixed together to provide a personalized AutoCAD that can do a lot more work than it does now. To try the power of intelligent objects, we have created two of them, (Bubble and RefPoint) that can be downloaded. AutoCAD 2000i has the potential for almost unlimited improvement and customization. Contact us for some expert suggestions for your own particular needs and applications.