[geeks] CAD and wireframes Was:This would make a good workstation

[vance at neurotica.com]

On Tue, 4 Mar 2003, Michael Schiller wrote:

> > I'm not sure about a direct speed comparison, but I know that the
> > featuresets are *completely* different.  The IBM cards are designed
> > for CAD, so they can do all sorts of complex interpolations and
> > extrapolations for taking measurements in CAD software.
>
> Back a few years ago when I still had a real job (back in the mid 90's)
> I was looking for an app that could take a scan of a part drawing and
> convert it from a bitmap to a usable vector format. Kind of the way OCR
> takes a scan and makes text out of it. At the time I didn't find any
> solution, and so just stored the bitmap images, to print out on paper as
> needed. The originals were drawn between 1894 (the earliest ones) to
> 1948 (the latest one I'd seen), and were becoming brittle, so I didn't
> want to have to use them in every day use anymore.
>
> At this point in time is there an app that can do this? And even better
> yet, is there one that can read the drawings, and convert them into a
> format that can be used by a CNC milling machine? This was another goal
> I had, I had setup a machine shop to make our parts, and I was looking
> into getting a CNC mill, a few I saw could read autocad files which got
> me on the thought of scanning in all the drawings (there were about 1000
> of them)
>
> I'm just asking now out of curiosity, as I'm no longer involved with
> that company, but I did work there for 20 years, so I'm kind of still
> interested.

The only way I know of to do this is to slap the drawing on a digitizer
and trace it.  But if you were careful, you could get a pretty exact copy.

Peace...  Sridhar