Desktop Design

Sean Farrell is not an artist, an architect, or even a draftsman. But as founder and president of Maritech Marine Electronics in Stamford, Connecticut, he needs to be all of those and more. As a full-service marine electronics dealer, Farrell can sell his customers virtually any piece of electronics on the market, and frequently he's responsible for selecting and pricing a complete electronics package to suit a yacht's needs. But since his technicians also install the equipment, Farrell must plan the installation as well. And that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish.A complete installation plan shows where the units will be located on the dash, of course, but it also must show cable runs for antennas and transducers, all power connections, and which units will be interfaced together. To create such a plan, Farrell could sit down at a drafting table and draw the whole layout by hand, clearly an inefficient process that does not lend itself well to subsequent modifications. Or he could use a software program by Corel called Visual CADD (which stands for Computer Aided Drafting and Design) and do it all in a fraction of the time. He opts for choice B, and now, so can you.

If you are planning a new-boat electronics installation, upgrading your existing package, or just want an accurate drawing of your electronics layout, Visual CADD is clearly up to the task. This software program was originally developed for architects, and so it includes 200 house plans, 1,900 architectural symbols, and more than 5,000 mechanical symbols, some of which will come in handy as you create your own helm station using computer-aided design.

Your first reaction might be this powerful program is too complicated and hard to use. Not true. To test Visual CADD's functionality and ease of use, I spent several hours noodling around with it in Farrell's office. And after getting a brief tutorial from Farrell, I was able to create the sample helm station and electronics layout shown here. And that was just practice. If this were a real installation plan--like the ones Farrell regularly makes for his technicians--it would show all the wiring, connections, and other information needed to guide the technician (or you) through the entire installation process.

To design an installation from scratch, Farrell says you should contact the boat's manufacturer and get a copy of the helm station's CAD plot on disk. This scale drawing will show exactly how much real estate you have to work with on the dash, and dash space will ultimately determine which units, and how many, you'll be able to install. If the builder can not supply the file, you'll have to take matters into your own hands by measuring the dash and then drawing it in on Visual CADD.

Once you've decided which units you'll buy--brand and model of radar, GPS, electronic chart display, VHF radio, and so on--the next step is to check each unit's spec sheet for its physical size. You'll need to know the dimensions of each case (height, width, depth), and then you'll draw each unit individually and "place" it in the dash design. (Visual CADD is not a 3-D program, so while you won't enter in a unit's depth, you need to check it against the clearance behind the dash to make sure it will fit.)

To test this on Visual CADD, I drew a scale version of Trimble's NT200DGPS. The first step is to draw the "box" or outer case dimensions on screen. As is true with many drawing programs, Visual CADD has a rectangle-drawing tool that lets you click-and-drag a rectangle to any size. But this is an approximation at best. A better way is to simply type in the case dimensions and the program will draw the box automatically.

When doing this, Farrell has a golden rule: Think metric. He never uses U.S. inches since fractions complicate matters. He uses millimeters for all dimensions, and spec sheets usually list case dimensions in both inches and centimeters. To convert inches to millimeters, divide inches by 0.04. If the result is not a whole number (for example, 256.87 mm), round up to 257 and enter that. (The error is of no consequence since the hole you'll cut in the dash will be smaller than the case size.) To convert centimeters to millimeters, just remove the decimal point (25.6 cm = 256 mm). In the case of the Trimble NT, I simply entered its width and height (256mm x 177mm) and Visual CADD created the scale rectangle instantly.

The program has a text editor, so if you want to go the down-and-dirty route, you can simply write TRIMBLE GPS inside the case and leave it at that. But I chose to draw every element of the unit, so the first step is to zoom in so the case is displayed full screen. The Trimble GPS has a rectangular LCD screen, so I used the rectangle tool and drew it in (in this case, close is good enough). The GPS also has rectangular and circular control keys, and the program's fast-copy function came in handy here. To draw the rectangular keys, I simply drew one and copied it down along the side of the LCD screen. You can copy a single key or any group of keys, and then rotate or rearrange them. While you can use the program's pull-down menus to reach the function commands, it's much faster to learn the two-keystroke commands for functions you'll use a lot like copy and delete. While the copy function takes some getting used to, it speeds up the drawing time immeasurably and keeps similar items (like keys) all the same size. And if you find you've drawn keys that are too big or small, you can simply highlight the group and resize them until they look right. Deleting a mistake is a snap. You just highlight the item and type e-r while holding down the control key. It vanishes, but this brings up an interesting point. When you are drawing items, it’s best to draw them outside of the object where they'll eventually be placed. The reason is that if you make a mistake and have to delete something, you don't want to delete anything else nearby. But if you do, the program is set up so you are drawing in layers, and you can step back a few layers in your drawing (use the UNDO function) to get the picture back to where it was before you made the big booboo.

Other key features, like line drawing, are just as easy to use, but I found the trim feature--which shortens a line--a little complicated and tedious. Against that, the EXPLODE feature separates a box into four right-angle lines, and you can modify, extend, or shorten any line or lines individually.

After I finished drawing the Trimble GPS, I highlighted the whole unit, zoomed out, and dragged it into its preliminary position on the dash. You will simply repeat this process with the rest of your electronics until you've drawn each unit and placed it where you might want it in the dash. Then, as you look at your plan, think about which items you'll want closest to the wheel, and which can be further away or even up in an overhead electronics box. You can configure them any way you would like, and then print out the final plan. By drawing your installation plan and then reworking it in Visual CADD, you can see the big payoff: It's a lot easier to relocate a radar at this point than after you pull out the hole saw and start making Swiss cheese out of your dash.

Ed. note: The minimum system requirements to run Visual CADD are a personal computer with a 386 or higher processor, Windows 95 or NT, 8 MB RAM, 18 MB available disk space, and VGA or higher-resolution monitor. List price for Visual CADD is $495.