Writing reports is just about doable in Word (the old hardware of keyboard & mouse wins really and the single USB port is a bit of a handicap here).Ĭamtech supplied the CL900 and are most helpful with technical support so far (which has involved testing removal of the Ntrig interface for me: a potentially risky manoeuvre in the 1st instance). It’s very efective and reasonably priced too. I can’t expect this little chip to push photos around in Photoshop so I have installed ‘Advanced JPEG Compressor’ to get the basics of crop and web-ready done. CAD runs ok if you accept its going to be a bit laggy with regens, opening up and the obvious graphics grief with image files. The outdoors screen view is ok, its not the best but its workable.
We did a full days worth and didn’t need to deploy the external battery pack: with a Powerbank MP3450 a comfortable 10 hours runtime should be easily achievable. The battery life for field survey is very good indeed.
With only 1.5Ghz prosessing speed and a max of 2GB ram you would think any current release of CAD (they only get bigger and slower don’t they!) would be a non-starter on the CL900- but if all you neeed to do is build wireframes and line drawings current release BricsCAD v10/11 holds up well ( yes it’s a bit slow to start…nothing new there!) and so I’m all set to find out if it will do a good days work.Īs you would expect with a light weight processor and solid state HD package power uptake is good and the battery warnings don’t begin to bleat until at least 8 hours runtime!ģ stations and 1137 points plotted into CAD and 49% battery left on its first field day is a very good result…I’m begining to like this! It may well be madness to expect the Intel Atom (even at 1.5Ghz with 2GB of ram?) platform to manage all this so let’s start with getting to grips with CAD on a netbook- can it work?
The essentials are CAD, Bluetooth, Serial Comms (USB or Dsub9) email and internet, I also need to be able to write reports, read and write PDF, handle images to a degree (more on this later) and present PowerPoints.
A quick look at what you can run on an Android unit and the lovely cheapness doesn’t look so good.So if I have to lug a tablet around the world (and believe me, I do) what do I expect it to do? it isn’t Windows’ (or to put it another way if you can’t run proper CAD on it it’s an expensive door stop) lesson the hard way. Having tried to do something useful with the beguiling iPad I feel I have learnt the ‘if it isn’t Windows…. Suddenly, after using these things for years, there is a rash of apparently cheap Android/ Ios/HP OS tablets available on any high street (well retail park anyway) for well less than a grand. Its logical replacement is the Motion J3500 but, being of reduced means, I have decided to look at what can be done at the budget ‘netbook’ end of the market and this is where I met the remarkable CL900. There is nothing wrong with it, its a great teaching tool, but it’s too long in the tooth to hold up AutoCAD 2012 or Windows 7 so well…and it’s starting to feel heavy compared to some of the newer kit that’s begining to appear. Not much to ask, and as the tablet wars hot up things should be getting better for the practitioner.My workhorse is the Motion Le1600 which will run most of what I need, will power up all day long on 3 batteries and has a just about daylight readable screen.
What we need is a reliable, daylight readable and portable device that will run CAD all day long so that we can see what we are doing as we do it.
The following prompts are displayed.Tablet PCs come and tablet PCs go but the problem of the field PC remains the same. In 3D workspaces (not available in AutoCAD LT), the Coordinates panel is on the Home tab. The UCS is a moveable Cartesian coordinate system that establishes the XY work plane, horizontal and vertical directions, axes of rotation, and other useful geometric references.
Similarly, you may ask, what is a UCS in AutoCAD? The move command's first point should be 0,0,0. Then move all of your objects from the UCS origin to the WCS origin. To move your objects to the WCS origin, turn on, unlock, and thaw all layers. Normally in 2D views, the WCS X axis is horizontal and the Y axis is vertical.Īlso Know, how do you change WCS to UCS in AutoCAD? To make WCS active, type UCS and hit return twice (or rightclick on ucsicon and choose WCS).
By default, these two systems are coincident in a new drawing. There are two coordinate systems: a fixed system called the world coordinate system ( WCS) and a movable system called the user coordinate system ( UCS).