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Bricscad Support (AutoCAD LT Alternative) for Design Master Electrical

Tuesday, February 1st, 2011

Making Design Master work on AutoCAD LT has long been a request of our customers. Unfortunately, Autodesk does not allow third-party programs such as ours to run on AutoCAD LT. This limitation, plus support for 3D, is the difference between full AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT.

About two years ago, we learned of a company called Bricsys. They have an AutoCAD clone called Bricscad. Their goal with Bricscad is to allow third-party programs that run in AutoCAD, such as Design Master, to run on their platform as well. The benefit of their software is that it is much cheaper than AutoCAD–$665 for a new license and $235 for a yearly subscription (versus $4,425 for a new license of AutoCAD and $430 for a yearly subscription).

Over the past two years, we have been working with them to make their software and ours work together. It is not an exact replacement for AutoCAD yet, but it is close enough that we are ready to start beta testing Design Master Electrical with Bricscad. We are looking for customers who are currently using our software who would be interested in helping us with this test. If you are interested, reply to this email and let us know.

There are currently two known limitations in Bricscad in Design Master Electrical.

  • 3D modeling does not work. You cannot create 3D conduits or cable trays, and the functions to export to IFC files for 3D-BIM Revit compatibility are not supported.
  • Activating other drawings to apply changes does not work. We use this feature when changes to one drawing affects another. You have to manually open the other drawings to have the changes made to them.

In addition to those limitations, there are a number of additional limitations in Design Master HVAC and Plumbing that prevent us from being ready to declare that those programs work with Bricscad. Bricsys is aware of these errors and is working to fix them in their software. Once they are overcome, we plan to support HVAC and Plumbing on Bricscad.

8 Responses to “Bricscad Support (AutoCAD LT Alternative) for Design Master Electrical”

  1. eric says:

    very cool. BRX Api? So it won’t work on linux? Might have to switch the laptop back over to XP and check this out.

  2. David Robison (Design Master Software) says:

    Yes, we recompiled our ARX as BRX for Bricscad. We use a number of Windows specific libraries in our software, so just like we won’t be support AutoCAD for Mac, we won’t be supporting Bricscad on the Linux platform.

  3. eric says:

    Probably not much of a demand for either platform. The choice to support Bricys is a great move. I look forward to seeing how this progresses.

  4. Bill Pickett says:

    I would be interested in trying this. Will DM work with the evaluation copy of Bricscad?

  5. David Robison (Design Master Software) says:

    The current version of DM Electrical includes all the files necessary to run in Bricscad. To configure Bricscad, open the install drawing from your admin folder and follow the instructions there.

  6. Bill Pickett says:

    Will the new DM Electrical beta release work with Bricscad?

  7. David Robison (Design Master Software) says:

    Yes, Bricscad is now an officially supported platform for running Design Master Electrical. All future versions of it will work on Bricscad.

  8. Bill Pickett says:

    Just a note to let you know that I’ve been using Bricscad with DM Electrical for a little over a month now and I’m very pleased with the results. The beta version appears to be much more stable than version 8.0.3 that I started with. Still an occasional DM crash, but that was true of AutoCAD as well.

    Occasional issue with Bricscad when working with multiple files. No problems when working with single files. For the price, Bricscad is a great value once you wade through the setup process, which can be daunting at first.

    I’ve completed a number of projects using Bricscad and DM Electrical beta with the same good results I’ve come to expect from Design Master. Thanks for the tip on Bricscad! I’m sold.

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