Does anyone use this software for estimating or creating models for their machines? I'm have a trial version for this software and find it pretty difficult to use. I don't have a digitizer and the files I have for the drawings are in PDF? Does anyone know how to take a pdf file and import it to Carlson? What are others experiences in this type of software?
I used it and I didn't care for it at all. The digitizer is a pain. If you have any cad experience you can do alot of the same stuff with the Carlson stand alone cad program. For what the program cost I don't think it is worth it. Just my .02
I have used the trimble one I think it was PayDirt. The program worked ok if you digitized. But if you import from cad it was a pain in the butt. I agree if you have cad skills you can do the same thing in autocad. I would only use one of these programs if you must digitize the plans. I have had plans scanned in and rasterized then used autocad from there. Last I checked the paydirt program is worth like $10,000. I would also look at Insite takeoff. If I was to buy another program I think that it would be the one. The main advantage of these programs is it guys you nice graphical views of the jobsite in 3d that autocad cant do. Also it gives out nice reports that can be used in generating proposals. The last good feature is that it will tell you how much to raise or lower the site to get it to balance. Which is nice if you can tell the owner he can save $1,000's by not import or exporting fill. Say if you were to raise the whole site like 6" you would lose 100's of yard of material.
Thanks for all of your imput. Will the other programs like the insite work with GPS grade control systems
Yes insite will export directly to most machine control systems.
yes they will work. All you should need is to have a dwg file for you "layout" of the job on the screen and I don't know what system you are running but you should just need a tin file of the existing and designed grades, and these files can be uploaded to our machine control
Here's a glowing review of InSite: