Freeware Programs

[Scotch_Tape]

I've found myself doing a lot of projects around the house and was wondering if anyone knew of a free(or cheaper than actual autocad)  autocad type program.  I want something that works better than MS Paint.  Even just a computer generated graph paper would be better than the way I'm doing it now.


Some projects that I'd like to use this type of program on...

-Electrical wiring and framing blueprint of house.
-Small waterproof box to add to motorcycle for various electronic additions
-landscape projects (birds eye view with measurements between trees/house/sidewalks/ect.

Those are just a few.  I'd rather not go spend $400 on something the professionals are using if I can find something free to screw around with.  I have little AutoCad experience but could probably find my way around with watching enough youtube video walk throughs and a little time. 

Thanks!
Scotch

[craigtothed]

Heya Scotch.

My wife is an interior designer and she uses google Sketchup to do houseing and landscape designs. It may not work on the electrical bit but it will do the landscaping marvelously.

Cheers
Craigtothed

Good to see you outside of Lexia!

[UOMaddog]

If you have Micrsoft Vizio you can do that, otherwise you could use publisher or powerpoint, though it would be much worse. Paint.NET works decently as a replacement somewhere between MSPaint and Photoshop

[12TimesOver]

I use Visio mostly, it's not free of course but it's cheaper than Autocad.

If you can't get Visio take a peek over at www.sourceforge.net and see what a search might bring up for you.

If you're looking for an image editor you want Gimp, I don't think that's what you need here though.

X

[Scotch_Tape]

Cool, I'll take a look at those. 

One of my main problems with MS Paint is when I do drawings I make a key with different lines that represent different lengths and copy it over and over to make whatever it is I'm drawing to scale, but for whatever reason in MS paint when you flip a line 90 degrees it never comes out the same length.  Really annoying and throws all my drawings off.  Now I have to have double lines (one horizontal and one vertical) to fix this problem.  The whole process, even though I feel I've improved my time, takes too long and would be nice to just have a program to do this.  I might just go spend the money on autocad.  I'll try the programs suggested before spending a lot of auto cad though.

Thanks!

[UOMaddog]

You can get Visio for much cheaper than AutoCAD if I remember correctly (I get it free through school though)