Live data from Hacker News

RoomScan: Get a Floor Plan in Minutes Just By Walking Around the Room

architizer.com

71–78 of 78 posts

Re: RoomScan: Get a Floor Plan in Minutes Just By Walking Around the Room

#71
post #48
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My HOWTO: 1. Obtain laser tape, pencil, and paper. 2. Sketch out floor plan with pencil on paper in rough scale. 3. Take laser tape and take needed measurements. Annotate measurements on your rough scale paper drawing. 4. Go back to desk and open OmniGraffle (or Visio or whatever). 5. Draw up a scale floorplan, exportable into any needed, industry standard formats. 6. There is no step 6. Some variation of this HOWTO…

This app seems valuable to non-professionals who may want a digital floorplan of a room. Since you are a professional with 20 years of experience, you have an established workflow, and know how to deal with the variations. Experts will often be able to out-perform automated solutions, which is fine. Those automated solutions are for non-experts.

> This app seems valuable to non-professionals who may want a digital floorplan of a room.

No data is better than bad data.

Re: RoomScan: Get a Floor Plan in Minutes Just By Walking Around the Room

#72
post #25
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And your laser tape translates those measurements into a floorplan that's digitally sharable?

My HOWTO: 1. Obtain laser tape, pencil, and paper. 2. Sketch out floor plan with pencil on paper in rough scale. 3. Take laser tape and take needed measurements. Annotate measurements on your rough scale paper drawing. 4. Go back to desk and open OmniGraffle (or Visio or whatever). 5. Draw up a scale floorplan, exportable into any needed, industry standard formats. 6. There is no step 6. Some variation of this HOWTO…

Would you be interested in a service that takes your paper drawing and does step 4 and 5, in Autocad and gives you the results within 24 hours?

Cost would be at $10 - $15 depending on house size.

Re: RoomScan: Get a Floor Plan in Minutes Just By Walking Around the Room

#73
post #53
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet someone once said the same thing about the laser tape replacing traditional tape measures.

No, absolutely nobody ever said that. The only con of a laser measure is the price (compared to a foldable analog one), but apart from that (and for the purpose of measuring rooms and buildings), a laser measure is superior in every way.

You can't see the laser dot in sunlight at a distance > 10m and for some measurements keeping the point steady is important but hard to do without a tripod. In both cases the laser can be inaccurate as you can't be confident in what you have measured. Obviously laser theodolites can solve these problems but are about 1000 times more expensive than a reel tape.

Re: RoomScan: Get a Floor Plan in Minutes Just By Walking Around the Room

#75

I hoped that either they got their hands on Project Tango device or worked with this team in Zurich - http://www.i-programmer.info/news/192-photography-a-imaging/... Edit: Btw, anyone who applied for Project Tango got back from them in any way? I didn't.

We heard back and got a device last week.

If so, they're being rude toward the rest of us.

Re: RoomScan: Get a Floor Plan in Minutes Just By Walking Around the Room

#76
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My HOWTO: 1. Obtain laser tape, pencil, and paper. 2. Sketch out floor plan with pencil on paper in rough scale. 3. Take laser tape and take needed measurements. Annotate measurements on your rough scale paper drawing. 4. Go back to desk and open OmniGraffle (or Visio or whatever). 5. Draw up a scale floorplan, exportable into any needed, industry standard formats. 6. There is no step 6. Some variation of this HOWTO…

Would you be interested in a service that takes your paper drawing and does step 4 and 5, in Autocad and gives you the results within 24 hours? Cost would be at $10 - $15 depending on house size.

For only $15 ? I know a few people doing CAAD technical drawing, all day long. Often just recreating the sketches the structural engineer draw on a piece of paper.

Are you offering to do that manually (prolly outsourcing) ? You know, those paper drawings aren't 4 lines with 2 measurements :-)

Or are you looking into automating that ? That would be a very interesting side-project ... but that would be really hard to do character recog. on hand-written numbers that are all over the place :-/

Re: RoomScan: Get a Floor Plan in Minutes Just By Walking Around the Room

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We heard back and got a device last week.

If so, they're being rude toward the rest of us.

They certainly had a ton of responses, and possibly they plan on working their way down a list or something.

Re: RoomScan: Get a Floor Plan in Minutes Just By Walking Around the Room

#78
post #64
post #6

Quite disappointed - was hoping this was done through computer vision. Aren't there are apps that do this? By the time I've 'scanned' a room the way it's shown in the article, and if that method doesn't even give me heights, doors, windows and outlets, and is only accurate to within half a foot - by that time I've measured it with my laser tape measure 3 times over.

I was a residential contractor until a few years ago. This would be great for estimating. Nice way to replace a pad of paper with less than stellar drawings on it. When estimating I'd still take pictures of the rooms to help me recall what it looked like. For most projects a measurement to within half a foot is fine for estimating. If the total width of a room is close to 12 or 15' (standard carpet roll widths), get…

Yes, I have a Bosch. From the looks of it, this app isn't faster, nor does it add any other significant advantage. You still need to measure the location of windows and doors, width etc. And you need to manually add that to the plan. Or, what I usually do (although I'm a developer, not a contractor), is write down areas directly. I'm still not convinced, and if they're targeting the professional market, I am part of their target group. YMMV etc., obviously, and if they manage to build a business out if it, more power to them.
Post reply on HN