Digitizing pads and CAD

Man, way back… there used to be digitizing pads. I thought that was a handy darn thing, but maybe we were clinging to paper drawings.

I was wondering if a poor man’s digitizing pad could be made with a light table and a plexi optical target bolted to the bottom/side of a mouse.

The software side of modeling from images in the laser class might be advanced enough to make data from images… If I could get the images.

See the plan sets for the 1:144 combat boats are often some 5 or 6 feet long… but most are custom blow ups from reference books in the library.

If not… is a good light table still something people would use??