jtcapa1

Well I prematurely tried my first "as-built" with the Asus Tablet running X7 and the Disto installed.  I spent some time pre-drawing the outline of the house before I went to the site, which can save time.  But all in all it was a real mess.  It did not help that the Real Estate agent had a 1 hour time deadline either.  Everything started out well, but here is what my inexperience discovered that was difficult.

1.) The ability to actually draw walls by picking the icon then pressing the stylus down and dragging, did not work as I'd hoped.  The touch pad is sensitive and my technique is flawed, as I kept either falling short of the target, or short of the wall I was trying to connect too.  Plus my fingers flying way from the stylus and nicking the screen caused all kinds of oddball walls to appear.

2.) My ability to pick an errant wall and grabbing an end point to create a new wall or drag it one direction left or right, up or down, was dismal

3.) Once the walls were roughly in place, I attempted to measure the inside wall to wall lengths by picking the wall (then hit select) then tapping the dimension I wanted to highlight and change, go to the Disto and take the measurement, which would put in the surface to surface length (I forgot to set up defaults to dimension to the surface). And this worked for about 15 mins. 

I then got some kind of error message that told me to call Chief Architect and the Disto stopped working to transmit the dimensions to CA.

So from then on out I had to take the laser dimension and use the popup keyboard to type in the dimensions, and I discovered that keyboard does not easily have the "feet" and "inches" characters available, so I had to mentally convert the feet and inches from the Disto to all inches and type those in.  That was not easy.

I finally ran out of time and had to resort to paper and pen to quickly finish taking all the dimensions.

This is going to have a steep learning curve.

Any idea how to fill in numbers on a tablet? If there is no keyboard attached?

Thanks Perry I'll have to jet to Office Max and pick one up

Great Scott, I think I'll call support.  I've never tried creating a plan with my fat fingers and I'm struggling with how to grab walls, type in text and dimensions using a touch screen.  Anybody have experience with that?  So far though I've gotten X7 installed on this little 10.1" Asus T101TA, then the Disto software installed, then the Bluetooth enable and got it all to communicate! Yeah.  For only $130 on a Woot Sale this handy tablet with a detachable keyboard, running windows 8.1 works great!  Perfect for field measuring.  Can't wait to try it once I get the basic finger drawing method down.

Anybody got a good Douglas Fir Tree?

I did get it all to work together with Chief Architect and the Disto with software installed.  Works pretty good with the exception of the fractions.

When I measure by hand or with a laser not connected to the computer, I would round up or down by 1/2" before writing down the dimensions

Disto and CA communicate the dimensions down to 1/16" fractions and I can see that will end up making a very accurate but difficult as-built to

work with.

Also there are dimensions like floor to ceiling which I don't want to communicate to CA, or can't (I think) so you have to be careful when you are just

checking dimensions with the Laser, as it wants to send the data to CA.

Time will tell.  I can see that the software has some macro's you can tweak that might adjust the fraction limits.  Will have to test it out more.

After reading the posts, and looking back over a 30 year career as both and Architect and a Building Designer, I can see where Johnny  is coming from.  Architects are trained to think with our hands on paper, at least before computers took over.  We fondly refer to that old dusty role of tracing paper you forgot you had, as "talking paper".  We simply could not have any kind of design discussion without it.  Fast forward 30 years and we can see that the next generation of Architects and designers are thinking more digitally, and us old dogs are really trying to commit to thinking digitally but it is a double edged sword.

All the time we would lovingly dedicated to thinking and sketching by hand has been replaced (mostly) with thinking and designing in our heads, while trying to quickly output those idea's into a digital CAD format that is both 2d and 3d.  The goal is not to get lost in the transition.  Paper and pencil is fluid and lets the creative idea's flow out nicely.  Mimicking that in 2d CAD has come a long way, and can end up with beautiful results like Johnny's work in a lot less time, than the old hand method, whereas creating in 3d is much less fluid for me.  I save time by skipping some of the design culling steps and jump directly into 3d work, but it still does not feel as creative and clean as the old methods.  I have to get the design model worked out in my head first before committing to a 3d model.  As you all know that is not easy.

But it can be very quick.

Wow. I had no idea that some of you guys got into that much detail with cabinets.  I've always just used CA for the basic layout, style and look, then let the Contractor, Owners work directly with the Cabinet supplier.  I guess that is why there are Kitchen and Bath designers.

_{Like many, I tend to use the program in its out of the box mode, and once I get used to using it that way, I don't tend to change easily.}

_{But, we all know there is a bunch of time wasted doing simple things that could be done faster or automated.  Libraries are a big one.}

_{I've been lazy in creating my own user library and then not organizing it until it gets to big and unwieldy.  The cut/paste and create}

_{sub-directories has been very useful and would have been smart to do from the beginning.  Going back and organizing feel like doing}

_{my taxes.  I really hate it.}

Couldn't find Perry's old Post to bump up but If you haven't updated in a while there are refreshes of a few catalogs available today, maybe more for you depending on what you have installed but some of the Core Catalogs were updated too

 

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Thanks Mick!

Oh. Basically this forum post has been answered.

Yes the Leica Disto E7100i does indeed work with CA X7 running in Windows 10!

Okay. I purchase the cheaper Leica Disto E7100i and downloaded the Disto Transfer software, paired the Disto with my PC/laptop.

Launched the Disto transfer software and changed the pairing code's as recommended by the CA tech article, launched CA X7 running in Windows 10

and tried a simple box.  Set up the internal wall to wall measurement dimensions, click on the wall I wanted to measure and move, aimed the Disto at

the target wall and hit the Dist button. It immediately measured it, and I heard a beep on my laptop and the wall and dimension changed to what was

displayed on the Disto window, along with a simple dialog box in CA.

So far it works like a charm.

Now I'm going to try installing all this on my cheapo Tablet and see if I have a field as-built measuring device that works!

Very cool!

So what did you guys discover?  Can you CA on a PC communicate with the Disto if you install the Disto transfer software? (does not mention support for Windows 10)

This seems to be a growing trend with the OS, background downloading and updating.  It really bugs me when this happens.

I'm not sure if that was the culprit, but the other day I was using X7 and trying to access one of the core furniture libraries and

CA grinded to a hourglass spinning slow down.  Every symbol I clicked on to get the image of the symbol took about 5 mins to

display.  CA kept giving messages about rendering the image and then just slowly grinded through the data until it could display.

I could not tell what was eating CPU or graphic card cycles, or if it was some other OS updating in the background thing.

Anybody else notice an odd slow down in their libraries?

Takes about an hour, and it must reboot a few times.

I've got the Nvida card on my Toshiba Qosmio, and I'm running a USB 20" monitor.  When I first updated to 10, the system did not recognize the second monitor, but with little effort I got Windows to see the Display Monitor software and install it correctly.  Now it runs just fine and I can run CA in either monitor without problems.  Still testing though.

I know that I just completed the upgrade to V10 and my CA X7 works just fine so far.

No problems or glitches....yet.

Thanks for the feedback.  I'm really tired of using the laser measuring device with paper and pencil.  Since I know nothing about tablets and don't really want one, I spoke to tech support and the every helpful Nigel told me that a Surface type windows based 2-1 type machine, "if it can run Chief Architect, will also work with the Distro".

So I decided to pull the trigger on an inexpensive Woot purchased Asus Transformer T100 ultrabook.  The detachable screen is 10", very thin, and light, it also meets the bare minimums to run CA.  So with fingers crossed, I also bought the $150 Disto and pray that the three things will work for doing my field measuements.

I'll keep you guys informed.   This system is as cheap, if not cheaper than a powerful tablet, plus it allows you to bypass the Room Planner App and input information directly into CA.  We shall see!

Is anybody using this software for as-built dimensions?  I'm thinking of taking the plunge, but cannot decided on the right Android pad, that will communicate with the Bluetooth Laser. Any feedback would be appreciated.

Try looking under "Wood"

 

http://www.cgtextures.com/index.php

 

A couple samples...

 

jon

Jon,

Can you give us a bit more information on this Texture site?  What is the benefit and cost of using these?  I have rare occasion for extra textures which CA does not have, and have created a special file for these, but I'm always interested in finding more like the site you listed.  Can you give some user feedback?

 

The system requirements only lists Disto Leica devices for Android:

 

System Requirements

 

• Android 4.4 and newer
• 2 GB of RAM
• 16 GB of Storage
• For Bluetooth lasers:
  • Device must support Bluetooth LE or newer
  • Leica: E7100i (D110), E7500i (D510)
• 341 MB Storage Space Free
  • Program — 14 MB download, 28 MB Installed
  • Content (Sample plans, Core Library - 313 MB Installed)
• Accelerometer and gyro with sensor fusion (Required for some Sojourn® features to function)
• Back-facing camera (Required for some Sojourn® features to function)

 

 

The feature list mentions Bosch, but that is for iOS only.

 

I'm new to tablets and if I get this it would be strictly for "as-built" dimensions.  I'm still using a laser and paper!  So what tablets will this work on? Getting confused by the 2gb ram issue and the Bluetooth "LE" as the specs on tablets don't often say what version of Bluetooth they have installed.  Anybody know which Android tablets this APP will work on??

Also please post how to turn that into a panel so we can experiment with other options.  Good job.

Any of your talent CA user know of a way to mix and match balusters in railings?  My client sent me some picture idea's which look cool but I'm restricted not by the choice of symbols in our CA library, but by the single railing choice for balusters.  Can't come up with a simple work around yet.  Any idea's would be appreciated.  

And this is the actual model...

I notice Ben Palmer comment about the check box for printing in color, and his lament concerning this as a new default in X7.  I'm wondering if I'm alone in taking advantage of the lower cost to print in color, and if anyone else creates permit/construction documents in full color?  I've been doing it ever since my print house brought a large scale color printer about 5 years ago.  

I know it is not AIA or CSI standards to print in color, but I don't really care.  I like the way it makes the drawings easier to read rather than just depending upon line weights and grey scale screening.  CA does such a fine job of rendering color, it just makes sense to create final documents in color too.

FYI follow up.  When I have transparency in the plan I print using Chief's pdf printer, then when the adobe file pops up, i then print that to my 3rd party printer that I prefer due to features etc.  And it works fine there since the transparency has already been processed.  If no transparency, then I bi pass Chief printer and use the 3rd party.  Hope that helps someone.

 

BTW, why is 'print in color' checked by default now with latest update.  Very annoying.  I rarely print in color.  Even if I uncheck, it doesn't retain that preference and I have to uncheck everytime.  This is from plan view and seems to work fine printing from layout.

Thanks Ben,

Looks like they are now aware of the transparency problem so hopefully it will be solved in an update or in the next release.  As to the color check box, I'm going to open a new thread as you pose and interesting comment about printing in color.