entering imperial units in metric drawing

AutoCAD 2010

Wondering if there's a way to enter imperial units in command line of a metric drawin and have it convert imperial to metric.

IE. I'm constantly taking field site dimensions in imperial and it'd be helpful if i didn't have to do conversion every time. Any ideas? Thanks in advance

Couldn't you put the conversion in you secondary units with a multiplication factor?

I'm constantly taking field site dimensions in imperial

Can you not get a tape measure with metric graduations

Can you not get a tape measure with metric graduations

Good question, eldon.

You can use QuickCalc and just hit apply and the value will go to the command line. You could use excel to convert all the data to metric and then into the drawing with a script.

Kinda cumbersome, but probably not too bad after you get used to it.

http://www.ellenfinkelstein.com/AutoCAD_tips_switch_imperial_metric.html

Personally if I had more than a handful of changes to make, I'd scale/convert the drawing from metric to Imperial, and then scale/convert it back if it needed to be a metric drawing.

It would be helpful if you were in a metric dwg and could enter imperial site measurements in command line and have them draw in metric!

nestly, is there a free lisp site where those metric/imperial conversions could be downloaded? thanks

They may be available as a lisp somewhere, however you can just copy the lisp code and paste it into notepad, then save them as whatever.lsp

Metric to Imperial

(defun m2i (len ang /)

(strcat "@" (rtos (* len (/ 0.03937 1))) "

)

Imperial to Metric

(defun i2m (len ang /)

(strcat "@" (rtos (* len (/ 25.4 1))) "

)

It would be helpful if you were in a metric dwg and could enter imperial site measurements in command line and have them draw in metric!

I am not quite sure why you need to ask the same question that started the thread, but the solution is simple. Scale the whole drawing, so that you can enter imperial site measurements. The scaling does not take long, and is even quicker than buying a tape measure with metric and imperial graduations.