Computer aided design package Essay

A guild c everyed Engineering ? Us pee employed me to find stunned the cost, benefits and the drawbacks of upgrading from their current method of hand made practiced rough drawing to apply an up-to-date Computer Aided Design ( blackguard) tract. This company designs and constructs duty article of furniture to order beca work of this execution only begins on an item once the exact details of the item cast off been calculated and yield the invitees approval.The current method which is used to gather the information that the designers need to draw the drawings for the office is to send over a person to measure the location where the item or items of furniture get out be fixed and how they leave get the item into the building. later this has hap composeed and the measurements gull been given to the designers the designers leave alone draw the draughts by pen and paper. After they have drawn the design they lead send the radiation diagram via unity of the companys employees to the client for him/her to look at and decide if it is what they wanted.If the client decided they equivalentd the design the blueprint would be sent down to the shop where they would start construction of the design. If the client didnt like the blueprint that the designers had made Engineering ? Us would find out from the client what was incorrect with the blueprints, because the designers would redesign the blueprints with the clients inputs in mind. After this it is shown to the client again to see if it is to their liking.The rationality the company is upgrading to a andiron based system from their hand drawn method is that up until now they have only had to make items on a smaller scale with a lot of time plyed for each project. Currently they allow the designer to make the drawings on the A0 paper taking their time which would take a few months, then have it sent to the manufacturing department to be constructed. Now they have managed to negotiate a contract with another(prenominal) company who leave alone require Engineering ?Us to make the items faster, this means that they will need the technical drawings drawn faster so they can construct the items sooner. To allow this to happen they have decided to transfigure from their current system to a information processing system based system using a hound tract appropriate to their involve. Engineering ? Us is a small company they have one office and a store which ar situated in separate places. The office block is where the items are designed and the workshop is where they are constructed using the designs from the office block.To transport the drawings from the office block to the workshop they walk over from the office block to the workshop with them, the reason they do this rather than any other method is that the dickens locations are very close together. Engineering ? Us has ten people working in the workshop where they are constructing the designs that are made and they ha ve two designers drawing the blueprints in the office. There are too heptad people who take blueprints out to clients to make sure that they like the drawing before Engineering ? Us constructs the design.These five people also take orders and measurements of the areas where the clients want the items to be placed and deliver the items to the client using a company van. The company has terzetto supervisors, one is in charge of the technical drawing department, one is in charge of the workshop and one is in charge of the five people who communicate at a time with the clients. One manager is in charge of all threesome of the supervisors and then the director of Engineering ? Us is above him. In total this brings the number of employees working for Engineering ?Us to twenty dollar bill and two of these twenty employees will be using the system I am to justify. The company has recently won a new contract from a client and now has to construct a lot more furniture over a shorter peri od of time. For the company to meet these demands they have decided to upgrade their workshop to use a CAM machine that will speed up construction. The CAM machine has already been elect by the company and the training plus everything else that is required for the CAM machine to operate. Engineering ?Us only require me to analysis the invention part of the company and make this more efficient to admit up with the new contract they have acquired. Engineering ? Us wants me to come up with a system that will run a CAD package that I justify for the company to use. This system will have to output a register format compatible with the CAM machine so that they integrate with each other easily. The contract will countenance the company with i 60,000 at the end of the year once all of the items have been constructed and delivered to the client. This will be paid in instalments at the end of each month of i5,000.This contract will also be renewed with the client providing that Engineerin g ? Us can adequately provide the items they required within the administer time frame. The system that I have been asked to come up with will have two users these two users are currently working with Engineering ? Us and they will need to be trained in using the new system as they have not had any training or follow out with any CAD application. They also need to have the capability to back up their drawings daily so that if something did happen to their hard drive back they wouldnt have lost everything.They also want all three data processors linked up to their own network separate to any others that the company already have. It also needs to be connected to the internet so they can download updates for their CAD package as updates get under ones skin available over the internet. The company has given me a budget of i 15,000 to come up with a costing to make or to secure two PCs capable of running a CAD package that I justify and anything else that is needed to run this appl ication. With this budget I will also need to buy an A0 coconspirator, two graphics tablets, networking equipment and training for the employees on using the CAD package.P2 The company currently has two computers in their office block these computers are very old and are only used for word process for judicial system tasks. The current specification of their computers is shown in the table below Component Specification Processor Intel Pentium 166 megahertz (Random Access Memory) RAM 30MB Optical drive CD-ROM x8 speed Hard drive 9GB Modem 56K The computers they currently have cant be upgraded to use any of the new CAD packages because everything in the current computers would all need to be replaced to make it compatible with any new CAD packages.This would effectively mean reservation a new computer rather than upgrading it, so just constructing a new computer would be a more cost effective way of proceeding. For that reason it would be better to keep these computers for administ ration purposes they are currently being used for, this would allow the company to still use them and not have to throw them away as they do their current task perfectly. DeltaCAD, MiniCAD, TurboCAD and AutoCAD are four antithetical CAD packages that I have found that could do the job required by Engineering ? Us.The reason I have chosen these four is because the CAM machine in the workshop will only accept . DWG files for practice session and if the CAD package didnt output . DWG files it would not be able to integrate with the CAM machine. These files must be contained on a floppy disk as the CAM machine has only a floppy drive input and then it will read the data from it and construct to the specified design. I have chosen to further investigate three separate CAD packages out of the ones listed above these three are DeltaCAD, TurboCAD and AutoCAD.The reason I have decided to investigate these further is that DeltaCAD is the inexpensiveest, TurboCAD is the mid range and AutoCA D is the most expensive out of the packages. Using these three will give me a wide band of different costs for the different CAD applications which will allow me to come up with cheap systems, mid ranged and expensive an system for the company. This will help me not only stick to the budget I have been allocated but may also save the company money depending on the over all costs of the CAD package that is used.After finding out more on DeltaCAD, TurboCAD and AutoCAD I have found out that the latest versions of these three CAD packages are DeltaCAD 5. 0, TurboCAD 10 and AutoCAD 2005. DeltaCAD is made by a company called Midnight Software, TurboCAD is made by a company called IMSI and AutoCAD is made by a company called Autodesk, both IMSI and AutoCAD sell other products that are like CAD, but they will not be suitable for the tasks that Engineering ? Us require of it. Upon further investigating I have discovered one problem with TurboCAD that DeltaCAD and AutoCAD dont have is that t he CAM machine ability not read the files it outputs perfectly.TurboCAD 10 outputs a different part of file but they state that this type of file is perfectly compatible with any CAM machine that reads . DWG files. Although they say this I think that from past experiences at that place could be problems from time to time with this type of file on Engineering ? Uss CAM machine, when these problems stand up it will slow the construction process down. P3/M2 I will have to either buy a new PC from a store or make the computers myself whichever approach is adopted the hardware that will have to be in the machine will be the same and is listed belowMotherboard which will fight all other hardware required for the computer Video card to output a let on on the monitor for the user to see what they are doing CD-ROM drive to install the software applications which will be needed for the task the company requires of it Floppy Drive to apparent motion the . DWG files to the CAM machine in the workshop to construct the items, this can also be very useful for fixing a broken computer or to help analyse its fault Case for all of the components that will make up the computer to go into.RAM for the computer to open up applications and to keep data that is being used at the present times Hard drive to install the software applications on and store the CAD files created Keyboard for the users to memorialise in alphanumeric data and other characters Mouse or other pointing device for the user to move the curser on the screen Processor to be able to process all of the data that needs to be processed Processor heat sink to take heat off of the processor and disperse it into the air.Fans to keep the components inside the computer cool enough to work correctly, e. g. processor yellowish brown, case fans and video card fan DVD/CD reader rewriter drive to back up the drawings that they produce during the day observe for the user to view what they are doing while using the comp uter Other hardware that will be needed that is not part of the computer and is not needed to get the computer working, but will be required by the company to enable it to do all the work required is the A0 plotter and graphics tablets.An A0 coat plotter will be used to print off the CAD drawings on A0 paper and used to show the blueprints to the clients, they then decide if they like it or not from these blueprints. The reason that they will need to be printed out on A0 size paper is because due to the size of the items they are designing and the amount of information that needs to be shown to the clients it can only be easily displayed on an A0 sized piece of paper. One advantage of the system for the plotters is that there would only need to be one cheap plotter that prints off the drawings in low quality.