Google Earth™ and TurboCAD

Bringing Together the Best of Two Worlds with GPS2TurboCAD

by Mark Crigler, P.E.

The Best of Two Worlds

Have you ever played with Google Earth™ and wished you could get those great images into your

TurboCAD drawing? Well a great feature of GPS2TurboCAD is the ability to bring custom bit-map images into the program, calibrate the image, and plot the points and lines from your GPS unit. Then with the click of a button, the image and point data can all be sent into your TurboCAD drawing, ready for you to draft over. The coordinates translation is done and the data is placed in your drawing!

While this feature is designed to work with any bitmap image source, one of the most popular is Google Earth™. This article is designed to show how it’s done.

Find your place in the world

For starters, you need an image to work with. Using Google Earth™, zoom into the area that encompases the GPS data you are working with. Zoom out a little bit extra to allow for some margins. If you have the latest version of Google Earth™ you can plug into your GPS unit and import the points. While you will also be doing this in GPS2TurboCAD, sometimes it helps to check the area you’re working on.

Next, you need to place two “calibration points” on the drawing. Using the “placemarks” feature, set one in the upper left corner, and one in the lower right. With the mouse cursor, hover over the points and write down the coordinates displayed in the legend. You will need these later for the calibration.

Leaving the points on the image, save the image to your computer.

Calibrate with Earth2CAD

The next step is to calibrate and import that image with the new Earth2CAD feature of GPS2TurboCAD. This feature is a simple wizard, only a four steps long In GPS2TurboCAD, click on the Earth2CAD button which starts the wizard
• Click next, which will take you to the panel entitled Step 1. Select the image you just saved from Google Earth™, and then click Use image. You will see the image appear in the window behind the wizard. Click next
• Use the mouse to left-click on the calibration point in the upper left area of the image, and enter the Latitude and Longitude coordinates in the text boxes. Click next
• Repeat the process with the lower right point. Click next
• Click the Validate Input button, which tests that you have entered the data correctly. If there is an error, go back and correct it, otherwise click Calibrate

That’s all there is to the Earth2CAD wizard, close it and return to the main program.

Send to TurboCAD

Examine the imported map, and notice that as you move your mouse over the image, the coordinates are shown in the bottom status bar. Here are the remaining steps:
• If you want to view your GPS data over the image, go to the GPS panel and import the points, then drag-select the points you want to display Return to the maps panel and click the Show Points / points, labels, lines, and grid as desired.
• Send to TurboCAD –make sure TurboCAD is running with a drawing started. Then simply click the button “Send Map to TCAD”. The image will be sent into the TurboCAD drawing correctly scaled and located.
• You probably want your GPS data plotted in the drawing as well. To do this, return to the GPS panel of GPS2TurboCAD, and click “Plot in TCAD”. The GPS points will be sent into TurboCAD as actual drawing items that you can work with. Just to test it out, go into the drawing and hover your mouse over the data. You will seem them highlight themselves, especially the polylines. That’s all there is to it!

I hope this demonstrates the value of GPS2TurboCAD and how this remarkable program can be used to help reduce the costs of field data collection.