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CP design software?
Crayola:
What are folks using to layout their control panels?
I am planning on building a simple jamma test rig
and I'd like to cut the CP out of metal on my CNC plasma.
Is there any dedicated software for this or are people
just using a CAD program? I wanted to make sure I get the
hole sizes and spacing correct.
Thanks Mike
Blanka:
Sketchup is great for a quick try, but not suitable for CNC as circles are polygons. Autocad like software is best for making good CNC files. Maybe the cheap chinese clone of Autocad has a trial (ZDCad). Another possibility is CorelDraw. I guess it has good DXF export, and it is better suited for to-scale drawing then Illustrator (and cheaper).
Nephasth:
I used Visio. My company offers discounted software from MS, so it only cost me 9.99. I was able to save my CP file as a .dxf in Visio and the laser cut it out exactly as I had it in Visio off of a usb drive. All the other guy had to do was put the metal on the table, load the .dxf, run the program, and take the metal off the table.
HotDogg:
I've used Qcad as a low cost CAD solution. Having no experience with this type of software I found the tutorials & manual very effective and I was progressing my design in no time. I'd say the big downside is that you are constrained to 2d.
Since measurements of most components are available online it was pretty easy to replicate the footprint of a button, trackball, etc.
Crayola:
Okay so.. all good sugggestions.
Now where are you finding the dimensions for buttons, switches, trackballs,
joysticks, etc?