Hardware and Software for CAD

I must be nuts! Writing on 3 CAD blogs?
Autocad 
Revit
Sketchup

Software: 
Not such an easy question to answer, mine at the moment is swinging towards using Autocad 3D solids to model houses.   This after a brief foray into the land of Sketchup.  Revit I find wonderful and maddening in equal measure, and will probably end up going down that rabbit hole.

Common to all of these is you have to have a suitable computer to run any of them.

Hardware:
My computer is getting on a bit now (like me) and just lately has started freeze up crashes that are only fixed by disconnecting the power.

So my options are:

1. Replace the hard drive in my existing Z230 with a new SSD for around NZ$150. My wife would certainly see that one as a no-brainer. The Z230 has had it's original K2000 graphics card replaced with a P2000 Quadro, which gives life to the old girl. Using Enscape on it is a delight. but paying for Enscape, not quite so much fun.

2.Buy a new computer. Immediately there is  a choice: Workstation or PC?  A man who started work with me, suggested the following PC:
 

Item                                                                                                                                      CPU - Intel i7-8700k                                                                                                         $659.00 Arctic Silver 5 High-Density Silver AS5-3.5G Thermal Compound 3.5          $20.00   Cooler Master Hyper H411R CPU Cooler with 92mm White LED PWM Fan$44.00 Motherboard - Gigabyte Z390 I AORUS PRO WIFI ITX                                       $401.00 "Hard drive - Samsung 970 Evo M.2 (2280),NVMe SSD R/W(Max) 3,400MB/s/2,300MB/s"                                                                                                 $228.00 Memory - G.SKILL Trident Z Series 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4 3200Mhz CL16                $616.00 Power Supply Unit - Cooler Master MWE Gold 650W 80Plus Gold Full  Modular Power Supply                                                                                                 $162.00 Case - Cooler Master Elite 130 Ultra Compact Mini-ITX USB3.0                     $79.35 "Monitor - Philips BDM4350UC/75 43"" 4K"                                                          $885.00 Mouse - LG Wired                                                                                                           $109.00 Mouse mat                                                                                                                         $26.00 Keyboard - Mechanical (cherry brown) (PB Tech G413 Mechanical Backlit gaming-carbon)                                                                          $148.00 CD/DVD Writer  (PB Tech LG gs40N)                                                                        $54.00 Windows 10 home                                                                                                          $182.00                                                                                                                                                 $3,613.35
Apologies for the above blank space- it seems importing stuff from Excel is tricky!

2. The other option is a high spec HP Workstation, which has a supposedly better graphics card in the P4000, namely a HP Z6 G4 3FF57PA

Processor model: Intel Xeon Silver 4116RAM size: 32 GB Graphics processor: Quadro P4000 Type of chassis: MiditowerFlash/SSD

One of these is around NZ$7000, so unless you had huge amounts of highly paid work in front of you, is probably a bit on the high side. 

A friend has pointed me in the direction of some articles, which can be found on the Cadalyst site:

http://www.cadalyst.com/hardware/workstations.

Just to make things even more painful, I am still running with Autocad 2016, which may or may not run 4K nicely, should I go completely mad and get a 43" 4K monitor.  It may run, but with a bit of tweaking.

An Architectural Detail Inserter

Over the years, I have noticed that as a contractor arriving at a new workplace which has other Autocad draftsmen, I would enthusiastically inform them that they could use a lisp routine or button to improve their workflow.

After several rebuffs, I got the message: "We don't want to know."

Sadly, I found this solitary fact about humans: They do not want to know about doing things more efficiently.

It is almost as if they have learnt for themselves some stupid technique, and because they have done this, they own it. That means any other way must be rejected.

I myself am not immune to this process, but if the correct way and reasons for it are placed in front of me, I have on occasion changed my method.

My latest project is a case in point. As an architectural draftsman, one of the more annoying parts of drawing a house is the assembling of the details.  For an ordinary house, this might come to around twenty A3 sheets, with as much as four details per sheet.

Drafting drudgery!  Surely it would be quick an easy to whip up a program to do this?

What were my options?

Using Autolisp was not an option as we are using Autocad LT.  in the past I have used Microsoft Visual Basic to serve as a means to generate an Autocad script, so I decided to go down this rabbit hole.

Three months of weekends and nights slaving over something a real programmer would see as a trivial job, I finished it.

Here it is, in action:

A very simple one form program, all it presents is a list of details on a panel which you choose from.  Once chosen, a preview appears. Pressing another button copies the file name to another panel. Once you have a list, next press another button to generate an Autocad script.

Running the script in Autocad inserts new layouts and viewports.  In model space a set of reference bubbles is found which you then put on your elevation.

My present work has shown no interest, but I retire soon and I may do a similar thing for Revit.  

The ethical consideration of letting a thing like this loose could be concerning.

Instead of spending say one hour inserting details you might spend five minutes.

Less work for draftsmen.  On the other hand, if I don't do it, someone else will.

Which leads me to the strange system of architectural drafting that is the standard at the moment, which is that every drawing office has it's stock of details which it inserts in the set of building consent drawings.

This to me, is nuts!

What is to stop the government from issuing a book of standard details to every builder?  Then all the architect need do is refer to this book in his drawings?

Of course, not all would be covered, but for an ordinary house they would be.

Anyway, check out my video on YouTube at:

https://youtu.be/3nGkR8J-dLg 

I did it myyyyy way!

Which, sometimes, is not everyone else's way! Recently the boss got me onto a duplex. The source was a drawing already done by an architect in cad, as a PDF file.

Oh goody, I thought, I can try out the 2017 Autocad LT command PDF import.  It seemed to do an excellent job on it, so I scaled it up and away I went, being Mr Efficiency, converting all the layers to our ones.  What I did not take on board, was that the boss, as an owner of the business, wanted things like windows to have a consistent look, and I appreciate that now.

What also proved annoying was the appearance of inaccuracy, namely walls that were not 90.000, but 90.200. Some were, some were not, so everything had to be checked, which makes me think it would have been faster to draw it from scratch.

Then my co-worker mentioned that she found layers named "gf New dim" annoying.  Why not just name them "gf dim"? Well I said that is my doing, because I wanted to have a constant layer set across all jobs, ie residential, commercial and renovation, so I can use my scripts to change colours of layers so I can see what layers I am on.  Currently we only use three colours, so you never quite know what layer an item is.  Needless to say I have a script button that changes all my multicoloured stuff back to good ole red and white!

I am supposedly retiring end of March, and propose to work from home an a contract basis, so it appears I am more wedded to my work than I thought I was.