Drawing Board is a fast and simple program for drawing floor plans and ductwork. Drawings can be quickly created by dragging and dropping drawing objects from the built-in object catalogs onto the drawing window. The drawing objects in Drawing Board are pre-programmed shapes such as entire room shapes, walls, doors, windows, and ductwork. These are intelligent objects that contain data useful for the Chvac, Rhvac and Ductsize programs. Soon, several other Elite Software programs will also include a Drawing Board window, each one having its own new, custom catalog of intelligent objects.
Drawing Board costs only $495 and it draws for both residential and commercial projects. Drawing Board works as an integrated component within other Elite Software programs such as Rhvac, Chvac, and Ductsize. If you buy Drawing Board, it automatically becomes enabled inside of all programs you have from Elite that relate to Drawing Board. For example, if you own both Rhvac and Drawing Board, you can sketch the floor plan of a project on the drawing window of Rhvac and calculations will automatically be performed right from the floor plan you create. You can also draw the ductwork for the project on the Drawing Board window in Rhvac, which you can either size manually from within Rhvac, or you can open the same drawing in Ductsize and let that program calculate all the duct sizes for you automatically.
A basic use of Drawing Board is to create floor plans so that hvac load calculations can be performed from the plans with Rhvac and Chvac. Duct work can be drawn and manually sized using Rhvac and Drawing Board, or automatically sized by using Ductsize.
How Drawing Board is Installed
A demonstration version of Drawing Board is included with each program that includes the Drawing Board window. As an example of the demonstration limits of the Drawing Board window, in Rhvac you can draw as large a floor plan as you like, but the load calculations will only be done for the first three rooms you draw, and the rooms will be limited to certain dimension restrictions. Once you purchase a license for Drawing Board, the drawing window will be 'unlocked' and load calculations can be done for all the rooms you draw on a drawing, no matter how large the rooms are.
Advanced Features
Drawing Board includes many advanced features. Here are a few of them:
- Professional Appearance: Drawing Board uses full color, detailed, double line shapes for walls, windows, doors and ductwork. This gives the drawing a much more professional appearance than simplistic single line representations.
- Realistic Ductwork: Drawing Board shows ductwork completely realistic with bends, curves, and fittings just like you have to install it. Duct board and sheet metal shows as solid grey or any color you like. Flex duct even looks like flex duct. Each duct section is shown on the drawing with its size and cfm, perfect for giving to the installer. Return duct sections appear just as nice and can be given a different color from the supply duct. Far superior to simplistic right angle stick drawings used for ductwork in other drawing systems.
Realistic Duct Fittings: Drawing Board can show realistic double line duct fittings that can be given any color. These fittings accurately depict what will actually be installed and make for specification quality drawings.
- Register/Diffuser Options: Drawing Board offers both round, oval, and rectangular registers that can be specified to any size, shape, and color you like. Flow arrows can also be specified to indicate one way, two way, three way, and four way operation.
- Full Precision: Drawing Board allows very precise control of line lengths and areas. No need to worry about rounding errors and unwanted shifting of objects due to lack of precision. You can set the grid and “snap to” setting to any precision desired.
- Undo: If you make a mistake while drawing, click Undo to backtrack your changes. The Undo dialog shows you a preview that helps you to choose precisely how many of your changes to undo. You can undo a single change or go as far back in the current drawing session as you like.
- Dimensions: Drawing Board provides accurate, easy to place dimension lines for all aspects of the drawing. All types of English and metric units are provided.
- Room Shapes: Drawing Board allows rooms with any number of walls and odd angles desired. The basic rectangular room shape can be modified as desired or select from eleven standard room shapes to save even more time.
- Individual Walls: All walls drawn with Drawing Board are individually selectable. Each wall can have its own material type, R value, orientation, and other properties related to HVAC load calculations. This also makes it very easy to define a partition wall separate from an exterior wall.
- Door Options: Doors can be drawn with any degree of opening and swing arc desired. Hinge side and swing direction are easily selectable and changeable.
- Floors and Layers: Drawing Board allows multiple story floor plans by using the concept of a sheet to represent each floor and layers to contain different types of objects per floor.
- Rooms, Zones and Systems Colors: Rooms can be assigned to zones and zones can be assigned to air handler systems that make up the building. Drawing Board allows room and zone areas to have different background colors so that it is easy to distinguish them.
- Zoom and Pan: Drawing Board provides numerous dynamic zooming and panning tools.
- Scaling: Drawing Board allows setting the size of the drawing page and includes all the standard architectural sheet sizes and scales, thus providing an accurate “WYSIWYG” picture of what the drawing will look like while you are still working in the editing mode.
- Printer Options: Drawing Board can print a floor plan on regular 8.5 x 11 paper or any size paper your printer or plotter will allow.
- Large Drawings: Drawing Board can also print a large drawing over multiple sheets of paper when the drawing is larger than the printer's standard paper size.
- Appearance Control: Drawing Board gives custom control over the appearance of all drawing objects and layers. You can change settings like the line type, color, and shadow if desired. All text can be specified with any font style and point size desired.
- North Arrow: Drawing Board provides an intelligent “north arrow” object that can be set to any direction desired and which controls the orientation assigned to all walls and windows.
- Borders, Title Blocks and Notes: Drawing Board makes it easy to create custom borders, title blocks, revision clouds, and callout notes.
- Standard Shapes: Drawing Board offers lots of standard drawing shapes including polygons, polylines, lines, rectangles, ellipses, arcs, text, rounded rectangles, and pie and chord objects. Use these to outline patios, flowerbeds, sidewalks and even create objects for custom object catalogs.
- Customizable Toolbars: Drawing Board uses five toolbars which can be fully customized and located wherever desired.
- Calculation Links: Drawing Board works with Elite’s Chvac, Rhvac and Ductsize programs and soon it will link with Fire and other Elite programs as well.
- Object Catalogs: Drawing Board has a collection of drawing objects to supplement projects. Objects include heating equipment (boilers, radiators, hydronic floor tubing, panels, etc.), appliances (washers, dryers, refrigerators, etc.), furniture (sofas, chairs, tables, etc.), plumbing fixtures (sinks, bathtubs, showers, etc.), electrical (outlets, switches, lights, etc.), landscaping (trees, shrubs, flowers, etc.) and many more objects.
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Ductsize
Manual D Ductsize
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