I urgently needed to do some testing with Aruba Bluetooth beacons and needed to test on a floor plan. As majority of us are all working from home because of covid-19 situation, I decided to use my home Lab plan for this testing.

But unfortunately I couldn’t find my home floor plan for the basement where I have the lab and needed a quick solution that would help me create one. I tried googling for some free apps and came across Magicplan. The app looked promising but was a bit time consuming and as per my restricted timelines I needed something that got me going in less than 30 mins.

I had an idea pop in my head and I went to the old school method. I drew the floor plan on a notebook using a pencil and took measurements with my Laser measure (this is very handy tool especially for Wi-Fi Site surveys and Site walks to scale map or take measurements on celling height, etc.)

Though the rough plan was ready it needed to be digitized to enter into Airwave. I had to think fast.

First thing came to my mind was to use Visio, before doing that and being a bit reluctant, I decided to do a quick online search for some other options.

That’s when I came across smart draw. This tool has an option to either create an online floorplan or to download and install the app on your computer. I decided to go with the online option as wanted to get this done ASAP.

A 10 minute video on Youtube was enough to get me going. Within less 20 mins I had a decent floor plan of the Home Lab to proceed with my testing.

If you ever need to quickly draw a perfect floorplan use SmartDraw. SmartDraw is the only alternative to Visio that runs on a Mac, online, and on Windows (and behind the firewall). With the best Visio import and export capability in the industry, SmartDraw is the easy, powerful and affordable Visio alternative.