Professor Vector by WB9RAA
Professor Vector is a Artistic and Mechanical Part designer. When you need Some Parts or Some Art, it can do the job.
Each shape starts with a home coordinate of X,Y and Z. The shapes are drawn along the X and Y plane with a constant Z.
You can easily zero the coordinates by clicking the X,Y,Z letter.
Z from -1,000 thru +1,00 inclusive, it defaults to zero. The values are unitless, when you import this into
a CAD or other program then the units can be inches, millimeters, feet, yards or miles.
You can rotate most shapes from -360 to 360 degrees. The rotation degrees is standard geometry
0 degrees is 3 o'clock and moves Counter Clockwise (CCW) thru noon, 9 o'clock, thru 6 o'clock and
back to 0 degrees at 3 o'clock.
You can select a shape from the Tabs from Arcs,to Ying Yang's.
Some shapes can be Rotated or Inset to make more interesting artistic designs. Shapes that can not,
will have these Rotation and Inset controls disabled. Clicking on Rotate will set the value to zero,
you can easily add 45 degrees by clicking the +45 label.
The Inset is in percentage and you can easily add +10%.
The X and Y defaults to 0,0 but can set set from -1,000 thru +1,000 inclusive. This allows you to
append several shapes in one file and not overlap one another.
The standard colors for the X,Y and Z axis are Red,Green and Blue and we use these when possible.Some shapes can be inset or scaled down to fit inside each other. Here is an inset heart at 82%, the inside heart is 82% of the outer heart size.
The inset heart can be imported into a CAD program (Such as PunchCAD ViaCAD) and Extruded to be a few tenths of an inch thick to 3D print a nice easy to make cookie cutter.
The Color of the DXF line is also settable from the default Red. The preview will show the same as the
DXF Color. You can set the line color as shown above in Red, the Bounding box and Marker cursor color show
as Purple, and of course the background color in light yellow. DXF files do not have a background color, it's for the preview only.
When you click on any of the color swatches the Color Selection Dialog will appear as above.
The preview shows all three colors in use.
You can turn on and off the bounding box, the text shows X,Y of the Lower Left corner
of the DXF files coordinates, and the Upper Right XX,YY of the bounding box coordinates.
Also as you move the mouse cursor over the preview image the X and Y coordinates are show in
Red and Green.
When you left click on the preview, you can set and unset the Marker. The Marker measurements
appear below the image. It shows the Marker MX, My position, the distance as the crow flies,
the angle, and the X and Y distance from the Marker to the Cursor.
The Array Grid, Dice, Polar allows multiple shapes to be drawn in a grid pattern,
dice like pattern, and/or polar pattern. All three patterns can be turn on at the same time.
All three can be easily shut off with one click of the Unclick GDP button. It saves a few mouse miles
select each tab and unchecking the Enables.
You can have the shaped rotated as they are Spun around the Polar array.
The above with Rotate shape unchecked, all Triangle have the same rotational alignment.
The above with Rotate shape checked, each shape is rotated as they are spun around.
As each shapes parameter is changed the preview is normally cleared and redrawn. You can
uncheck the Auto-clear to leave the old image displayed to get a reference of how things have moved
or changed. If changing values causes too much redrawing and slowing things down you can
uncheck the Auto update. You will then have to press the Update preview button to preview the changes.
Once you are satisfied with thee preview you can save the shape to
a DXF file or append it to a new or existing DXF file. There is no limit
to the number of shapes in a DXF file. But this can slow down CAD imports.
Professor Vector creates a folder ProfessorVector in your Documents folder to
save the DXF files. You can save the files anywhere but this is the default directory. When you uninstall the app it leaves this directory as-is, to preserve your data files.
The File Menu item Open File Location... Control+L will open this folder.
Specifications
64 Bit application for Microsoft Windows 7,8,10, and 11.
X,Y,Z coorinate ranges -1000 through +100 inclusive
Grid Array 16 x 16
Dice W / H 0.100 through 1000 inclusive
Polar N 2 ... 180 inclusive
Text Fonts must be TrueType fonts
Licensed Professor Vector provides Royalty free use of output vector and image files.
If you find these Apps useful and would like to send me a one time donation, I'd be grateful.
Thank you in advance