Hello everyone. I just came off of a big (for me) construction project. It was layout for high school athletic facilities and it kept me busy for 2.5 months each of the past 2 summers. Anyway, I usually prepare stakeout points in CAD and then make a sketch or print a small map in order to do my work. That works fine if I know what I'm laying out and have time to prepare but I was often asked for random points on a contour or bottom of curb or something similar and it kind of stinks to have to say "Ok, let me go back to the truck and I'll be back in a bit". I'd really like to be able to work within the data collector, armed with a dxf and dtm or even elevations per plan so I could stake lines and points per plan, on the fly. What do you guys and girls who do this for a living do? I mostly do boundary and topo but I seem to get a lot of opportunities for construction layout too and I'd like to become more efficient at it. I run an S5/TSC7 with Access. Can you all point me toward some learning materials that would help?
Gregg
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Without getting into DTMs which is a wholly more involved process -
Your printed out maps and hand drawn sketches can be replaced by a DXF underlay in Access. Assuming you have the CAD drawing on the correct co-ordinate system you can copy the bits you need into a clean drawing and then "save as" a DXF. This can then be linked into Access. If you just want it as a background keep the status as "visible" not "selectable". I may have some of the terminology wrong as I have been using Leica for a few years now. IMO linked jobs, CSV and DXF files are handled more powerfully and certainly more simply in Access compared to Leica.
What CAD software are you using?
I mostly export 3D or 2D linework and points as (small) DXF files and use these as my import method on the logger. Sometimes don't use CSV files at all.
Either way - the job gets built in CAD first, then on the ground. Can spot clashes, measure differences to as-builts - all sorts of things become possible from the comfort of the desk.