JMATech Roadway

Computer Aided Design and/or Drafting, mobile computers, Bluetooth® radios, laser distance meters are just the tip of the iceberg of a list of tools that today’s engineer, architect, contractor and other building professional have to master and manage to bring a project in on time and under budget.

JMA Technology, Inc. has been on this road since the late 1960’s. At the time we had a contract to develop a 3 dimensional space frame analysis program for NASA’s Apollo program. Since those heady days of space exploration we have been applying computer technology to our engineering practice.

In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, JMA started to integrate laser distance meters and electronic transits to a home grown civil mapping package. The electronic transits interfaced into data collectors (small portable computers) where heavy and power hungry. We were constantly running out of batteries. So to make things easier on ourselves, we developed a 22 oz, 2 line LCD display data collector that would run about four weeks before needing a new set of AA batteries. We then interfaced the data collector into a Hewlett Packard (HP) 3820 electronic total transit (also called a total station). The HP 3820 could measure distances up to a 3 miles and angles (horizontal and vertical) to one second.

In the 1990’s we interfaced cad applications to robotic total station. This included using remote control of the data collector and total station via radio. This still left the actual production of the drawing to be done in the office. Sometime during the project the field data would get an error into and drawing would then go off in some crazy direction.
We are currently developing applications that interface different types of laser equipment to ultra mobile personal computers. This allows the laser to be interfaced directly to the CAD application and help reduce the complexity of drawing existing structures, mapping an area or manage a construction projects.

This blog is about traveling the “Laser to CAD” road. We will tell you up front, that from time to time we will be peddling products and services. We will try to be objective about the topics we will be discussing. Most of the time we will be discussing the topics about the latest laser technology for measuring, how to use CAD on a mobile platform and try to answer you, the reader, questions.

So let us continue traveling the “Laser To CAD” road which will take us to the land of profits and higher productivity.