SparkFun Forums

[george graves]

I run across these new cheap tablets

http://www.wacom.com/bamboo/

$80 - they kind look like they might be nice to work with during PCB design. They're made for graphic artists - so they apparently are great for moving around the screen once you get use to them, since their mapping is linear and always the same. A point on the tablet always correlates to the same point on the screen kind of thing. (unlike a mouse)

Anyone give one a go?

[macegr]

I've tried it just for fun, and it doesn't impress me much. The tiny tablets are nothing like the giant tablet systems used in CAD machines of yore. All the major PCB packages are designed around mouse control. It's pretty handy to do things like use the scroll wheel to zoom, use the middle click to pan, etc. My mouse has extra buttons to select the DPI as well, which comes in handy when I want to do precise positioning.

Here's something you can try. I tried using a Wacom tablet for about a week, and found it roughly equivalent in annoyance to using a laptop touchpad for CAD. So give PCB design a try on a touchpad, and see if that works for you.

Graphics tablets these days are all about artistic expression. Pressure levels, pen angle, conveying the artist's characteristic skills and imperfections to the screen. Unless you're free-sketching a PCB, a tablet might not be ideal. The old CAD systems used tablets mainly because that was the most reliable pointing technology at the time.

[george graves]

Thanks!

[tronic]

I've never tried it myself but I could see where a Wacom Tablet might be annoying for that type of application. I do have a 3DConnexion Space Navigator that I love and often wish I could use with my Schematic Capture/Layout tools. For those who haven't heard of these devices, they are a sort of 3D mouse designed for use with 3D CAD packages like SolidWorks and Sketchup. Even though schematic capture/layout tools are 2D environments, the Space Navigator is so handy for panning and zooming that I believe it would still be great to use. Unfortunately the drivers don't seem to support OrCAD.

[TheDirty]

I have a cheap version of the Wacom tablet, though all the functionality is there. It works well, but even for photo editing, what I got it for originally, it's just not very good. Nothing like the full screen over monitor tablets that are used and a mouse is just so much better than even the 8" tablet I tried.