Digitizer Calcomp

[CaptainBob]

I have purchased a used CAD system, it has a old 386 computer, Autocad 12, plotter and a Calcomp Drawing Board III with a four button cursor. Plus I can use Autocad to make drawings

My question is how do you use it to digitize a large drawing 24" x 36" ?? I have purchased a used CAD system, it has a old 386 computer, Autocad 12, plotter and a Calcomp Drawing Board III with a four button cursor.

Every thing seems to work and I have the software and two instruction manuals from Calcomp. But what I'm looking for is a very simple step by step tutorial on digitizing a large or small drawing.

Thanks Bob

 

[NevarMaor]

Are you looking to manually copy the drawing? What I mean is - place the drawing on the digitizer and trace it out onto the screen?

I did that once years ago using a calcomp and AutoCAD (I think R9). What I did was reconfigure the digitizer to use whole area for screen display, then set drawing on digitizer and draw lines as I picked ends of lines on drawing. Once area drawn that was on digitizer I moved drawing and reconfigured the origin of the digitizer and continued. Once done I rescaled the drawing to 1:1 based on measurement of the drawing. Very tedious. Might be easier just to get someone to scan drawing as a raster image and then overlay that and trace it. I'm not sure but I think that's possible with Acad 12. Been a while since I used Acad.

 

[IRstuff]

I'm not sure how yuor Calcomp is set up, but most digitizing systems allow you to:

> select a layer for input
> select some minimum spatial resolution
> start a polygon entry point by point
> some means of closing the polygon

That's pretty much it. There should also be some means of setting the scaling of the tablet to match the drawing's.

TTFN