CAD Bounty

[monty]

Hello all,


I'm a Pandora owner who moonlights as Director of Development for Bristol Braille Technology. I should like to combine these two things in order to continue developing our prototypes whilst out and about with the Pandora. To this end I am proposing a bounty on a CAD software package, and starting it off with £40.


Either QCAD or Free CAD seem interesting, if possible. If, however, you know better, then reply below or PM me. The bounty applies to any 2D or 3D CAD program suitable for being used for product design (not necessarily circuit design). Given the size of the Pandora's screen, it will have to be optimised for 800x480 to allow maximum surface for drawing---menus hidden by default, that sort of thing.


I hope to get the ball rolling so that a more people can add to this bounty and we can get a really useful tool onto the Pandora.


Regards,


Ed Rogers


Edit: 15th Sept 2011

 

[MrChops]

Free CAD looks sweet. I'd love to see this. Looks like it uses opengl and needs 1 gig of ram. Sounds like a bit of a long shot but maybe a dev can chime in here. I did find this link about a guy that claims the basic program only needs 80-90 megs of ram.


http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/free-cad/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=846#p6353


Qcad looks like it would be a good option for 2d stuff.


http://www.ribbonsoft.com/qcad.html


"QCAD was designed with modularity, extensibility and portability in mind"

 

[monty]

After looking into QCAD, I would say that it looks appropriate. I need 2D more than 3D anyway.


However as others are perhaps less likely to want a 2D only CAD program I will refrain from adding it to the bounty for a day or too, just to see what the response is.

 

[Tempel]

There are a few free CAD programs, though none that I really like. FreeCAD looks promising, in that its design is of the same family as Solidworks, which I've grown to enjoy, but it has much development ahead of it. It doesn't even support sketch-based features yet.


BRL-CAD is venerable, but not much fun to use. OpenSCAD has found some popularity in the maker culture, but its script-based interface probably isn't for everybody. SALOME is designed for numerical analysis pre- and post-processing, but might be good for solid models, too (I've never tried it). And yes, QCad works, but 2D-only is limiting.


So those are some other possibilities for you, monty. I can't say how easy any of them will be to port to Pandora, but maybe you'll find one of them useful elsewhere.


PS: I assume you're looking for CAD for architecture, engineering, and construction, rather than for electronic design automation. There are many free tools for EDA, but fewer for AEC.

 

[Edglex]

Doesn't look easy to port... it uses 2 or 3 packages which all depend heavily on OpenGL. Not impossible though

 

[gruso]

I'd probably toy around with some CAD software for giggles. (My job is electrical drafting... all 2D baby).


Just now I've been inspired to fire up some ancient CAD software in DOSBox. Anyone remember ProDesign? Quaint (I actually used it to draw bad computery-cartoon faces when I was a kid. Without a mouse. What the hell.) Found some other cool stuff too. PM me for a good time.

 

[mcobit]

Sorry, Gruso, but are you turning into BlueProtoman now?


Edit: Maybe gruso was BlueProtoman all the time, just to troll away and spread illegal copies...

 

[gruso]

Oh er, the PM offer is just for CAD-created likenesses of my junk.

 

[mcobit]

O thought you wanted to "share" some old software for a moment ...

 

[gruso]

I will this time! https://www.box.net/...c8rt9ecfbu4.zip


Nothin' sus, 2x shareware and 1x public domain. Drop folders into /appdata/dosbox/games (or wherever you keep your DOS games) and enjoy.


(Monty: Hope you don't totally hate the DOS tangent in your thread. Just a bit of fun while we wait for a port of something!)

 

[monty]

Not at all. Those DOS programs are now on my SD card. I am tempted to try do some of our work on them in fact, but experience has taught me that ease of file import and export is paramount. Its that old UNIX thing of "liberal with input, conservative with output". And that DOS programs, however good, really don't do this well.


I'm going to amend the bounty to suggest that it applies to any 2D or 3D CAD program suitable for being used for product design (not necessarily circuit design).

 

[MrChops]

I learned on autocad 11, I wonder if that would run on dosbox. Gonna have to see if I can dig up my old copy.

 

[gruso]

Good idea, don't know why I didn't think of trying that! I learned on r12.