The iPad: Completed

The iPad became so quickly useful to my work in the shop that I began building a stand for it back in January. The preceding blog posts describe some of the technology and issues that went into building it. And for a while, the project became orphaned while other projects took up my time and resources.

But I completed the project today, and my iPad now has a workbench stand. The iPad has allowed me to go paperless. This is important for many reasons, not the least of which is that I no longer have to carry around a large drawing tube. I use a cloud based file service to store critical project files making those files easily accessible to my desktop computer, laptop, and iPad tablet. This means that each device has the most current version of any design or drawing file accessible at any time.

I print drawing files to pdf format whenever one is created or updated. The iPad app I use to access pdf based drawings and documents on the iPad is neu.Annotate+. Not only can I display a drawing file on the iPad, but neu.Annotate+ allows me to write and save notes on the drawing using a stylus. The project design can later be updated based on the notes I took earlier in the shop. This makes an iterative design-build process that much better managed.

The screen of an iPad is not exactly large. I had been using b-size drawing paper for some time now. No fear though as the viewing area on the iPad can easily be changed, and now it is easy to zoom up on a specific area of interest or small detail. In fact, I no longer include detail views on drawings.

One additional app I find useful to have on the iPad is ShopCalc. ShopCalc is a calculator that works in standard fraction format. This is undeniably great for those of us who seemingly will never go over to the metric system. ShopCalc will however, instantly convert between an English unit fraction and its decimal or metric counterpart.

And one last useful thing. Most tool documentation and instruction manuals are available online in pdf format which the iPad can of course store and access. I have found it very helpful to have a few on hand especially during machine tool setup or maintenance.