Batboard

Does anyone know of any company that offers trials for its CAD software?

I don't know of any that will let you try it. There are many, many, many hours f work to set up a CAD system. Every street in your jurisdication broken down by block, all available units, all grid sectors, runnining orders for the grid sectors, all your call types etc. Then to make it work well all premisies in your town should be entered so you can type in for example Walmart and the CAD will automatically populate stree adress, phone number etc. I set my depts system up with above info. It took 3 weeks and is still tweaked daily.

Just wondering... are you dispatching hall monitors?

I had been playing with a CAD system I got for a 30 day trial and it was very cool, I have a similar program from dukane but it didnt have many features. I'm just trying to find an easy way to map out an area for a large, multi building campus. and intregate it with a radio system so we use it for all kinds of trouble like fire, securuty, campus police etc. I was able to scan a arial photo of the campus and got it to work with a CAD system and got far but then the 30 days ran out

I was looking into the possibility of going to CAD for my agency. In order to get professional level CAD software, you have to contact salespeople. They will NOT allow it out of their grasp without making personal contact with you. They will want to know about your personal agency needs, requirements, and will try to come up with a solution. It may be just a stock package, but they will actually want to talk to you. You can find some stuff for 100-200 bucks that's borderline shareware. You get what you pay for. Most of the high end stuff has a 4 to 5 digit price tag (if not more), and requires specialized equipment, especially if you use MDC/MDTs.

I didn't get into the lower end stuff, as I basically gave up. There's a possibility that the end user modifiable stuff like you're talking about will be more flexible. The companies spend a lot of time/money on this, so they're pretty protective.

CAD companies can be a little funny about their software. More so that Motorola gets about theirs. If you are seriously considering a full blown CAD system the local reps will come out and demonstrate the system for you. You figure out what it is that you want and go with the system that best fits your needs. How alot of them price their systems is based on site licenses.

These are just numbers that flew around my office when we were looking at a CAD upgrade. Not sure what the total cost of our system was but most of the demos we saw (9 total I beleive) generally had a base price tag of over $150,000.

Software package, adapted with your MSAG and Map Data $75,000
Site license (each) $35,000
Training, installation and support $10,000 a year.

And from there is breaks down into all sorts of subcategories for development, delivery. Hotel bills (for the trainers to come train your people) etc. From start to finish at my center it took us the better part of a year to select the system, sign contracts and take delivery and get it live. But we have a small center of 4 consoles and a supervisor's desk.

"""a little funny about their software. More so that Motorola gets about theirs"""

Oh, yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!

Last few years I worked installing 911 dispatch equipment, my then boss and I were out of town, upgrading a dispatch, and had problems with some of the brand new Motorola software. Do ya think those people at M would send us replacement software????? (The system was not up and runniner, or "activated" yet, so we didn't have the numbers they wanted.)

We finally "borrowed" a copy from another system sitting at our shop, had it UPS'd down to replace the defective disk(s)

Bear in mind this was a legit Motorola service shop we worked for at the time.

Anyone here know anything about open source CAD software?

chipjumper wrote:Anyone here know anything about open source CAD software?

As far as I can tell, it's nonexistant.

I looked on Sourceforge a while ago. There was one project that hadn't released any files. If it was going to be done, you could probably expect to find it there.

Sourceforge for those that have never heard of it

I wrote a small "dispatching" software with php/MySQL last year for a board member. It has no mapping features of any sort. If anyone wants the basic script I'm sure I still have it around on the computer so just shoot me an email. You're free to play with it, improve it. All I ask is if you do anything cool with it I'd like a copy of the code.

I also found the open source program, and... here it is http://sourceforge.net/projects/opendisp

We use CAD from these guys at our casino: http://www.cyrun.com. Works quite well

I've gotten a few requests for the code. Let me clean it up and document some of it and I'll fire off a zip file to all of those that wanted it.

Does anyone know of a program that will do maps. Im looking for a prgram that will allow me to scan in maps and use them in incident management. Example: There is a fire in building H, i want to be able to highlight the building on the CAD map and send it to mobile units who have laptops so they know where the location is by looking at their computers. I know there is programs that will do this but im not sure where to look or even what ti call it.

Look at Microsoft Mappoint - Pretty cool piece of software.

Our county uses a program called Pictometry - which has photos of every square foot of our county from the air, that the dispatchers can reference. It is within the last 1-2 years that the photo's were taken, so they are reasonably accurate, more so than terraserver's.

-Alex

I should add... before you request the software from me. You need access to a PHP server and a mySQL server (which you have enough permissions to create a table on) for it to run. It is web browser based and you'll need to modify the script a bit to work with your system.

alex wrote:Look at Microsoft Mappoint - Pretty cool piece of software.

Our county uses a program called Pictometry - which has photos of every square foot of our county from the air, that the dispatchers can reference. It is within the last 1-2 years that the photo's were taken, so they are reasonably accurate, more so than terraserver's.

-Alex

Unless they had it done on thier own they probably signed on with the NY State Pictometry program they are pushing now. The current set of photos are upwards of 5 years old. But they are also currently updating that system to include "walk around" style photos. A 45 degree viewing angle is what comes to mind right now but I'm not positive. Our picture set for the pictometry is/can be interfaced with some of the more recent versions of MicroData's ALI-Trakker mapping software as another map layer.

I think most PD use GIS mapping.

Ours gets out the good old fashioned street directory. Maybe CIDS2 (new version of their CAD system, Computerised Incident Dispatch System) will do AVL, mapping and stuff.

contrak10 wrote:Does anyone know of a program that will do maps. Im looking for a prgram that will allow me to scan in maps and use them in incident management. Example: There is a fire in building H, i want to be able to highlight the building on the CAD map and send it to mobile units who have laptops so they know where the location is by looking at their computers. I know there is programs that will do this but im not sure where to look or even what ti call it.

We have a product that we used at the prisons called "Mobile Map". Each mobile guard truck had a mini map display inside their vehicle. When a perimeter alarm is tripped, the appropriate LED lights on their map showing where on the grounds the alarm is. I believe it is a product of Southwest Microwave. The mobiles received data over an RF link.

What Dukane product were you looking at? We're a dealer and I wasn't aware of a product that did anything close to what you're asking for, unless it was a EST fire product which does mapping for fire alarms.

What Dukane product were you looking at? We're a dealer and I wasn't aware of a product that did anything close to what you're asking for, unless it was a EST fire product which does mapping for fire alarms.

http://www.dukane.com/csd/edu/starcall.htm

We use starcall fusion which is a powerful program and does evering except fire annunciation and map event broadcasting. We use the Dukane system for commmunication to buildings and rooms. Im looking for a program that when the dispatcher highlights it will broadcast the location over a LAN to police units who have laptops with maps for better responce times.

I have been writing a cad client and server for about a year now. I actually started in 2000 but stopped for several years. It just does the basic cad functions right now such as adding, modifying and dispatching incidents, keep a full activity log for both units and incidents. Added an address database and addresses are verified and can be displayed with mappoint. I wrote this maninly as a hobby for myself to learn databasing and data access but its turned out quite well. Give me another year to work on it and I think I could have it ready for a small agency to run some tests. Here are a few screen shots I have. They can also be normal floating windows I was just playing around with no borders when i took these.

Sorry i dont have a version that would run stand alone as it needs a database to connect to, Either MS SQL or MySQL.

http://www.toolsez.us/cad/redsand1.jpg
http://www.toolsez.us/cad/redsand2.jpg

That's pretty cool - big MySQL fan here

Dos client I assume?

-Alex

Actually the client is written in vb. I just used the terminal font to make it look like its in dos. Easier to read for me and thats how i was used to seeing it.

Quite some time has passed by since the last reply has been posted to this thread... and the world has changed a bit in the meantime.

So there is the hope of some open source CAD applications being developed since then. Or any new trial versions of CAD systems?
Please let us know if you know about such projects!