Through the Interface

Creating additional documentation for Space Analysis in Dynamo 2.11

I mentioned last week that Dynamo 2.11 allows package owners to add additional documentation for their nodes via the enhanced Documentation Browser. I decided to give it a try, and then decided to test the possibilities around automating the process. Here’s the idea: the Space Analysis package comes with 15 different samples showing how to use its various nodes. These are all hidden away in the %appdata%\Dynamo\Dynamo [Core|Revit]\2.x\packages\SpaceAnalysis\extra folder, so lots of people don’t know they exist. What if the Documentation Browser told you about the samples that use a particular node when you pull up its help? Here’s... Read more →

Attend SimAUD 2021 for free

This year’s Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design (SimAUD) is starting on Thursday April 15th and runs through to Saturday April 17th. Thanks to sponsorship, people can attend this year’s SimAUD completely free, although people are being encouraged to donate their normal registration fee to either offset carbon emissions or to encourage the next generation of simulation experts via Girls Who Code. I really like SimAUD – I attended a physical event at TUDelft in 2018 and was involved in the Generative Design track in 2020 (and I have to say that given its size and nature... Read more →

Floppy Friday #24

In this week’s episode we load (or try to, anyway) a number of games from one floppy. We start with a game called Up ’n’ Down (mis-labelled as Bump ‘n’ Jump) and then try to play Jump Jet before moving onto BMX Simulator. Finally I try to load The Goonies, but fail miserably. I’ll have to see if I have it elsewhere, or can copy it to a floppy from a .d64 image. Here’s the video: Here are some reviews from Zzap!64 magazine. For Up ’n’ Down: For Jump Jet: For BMX Simulator: That’s it for this week. As... Read more →

Come work on Hyperion to help drive Data Visualization with Forge

The Forge viewer team is seeking to hire a San Francisco-based Senior Product Owner for Project Hyperion, the technology being made available as the Data Visualization Extension. (If you’re not familiar with the term Product Owner then in fairness you’re probably not a good fit for this position – the successful candidate will have PO experience – but here’s a link that may be of interest to you if you want to understand more about what’s involved.) This team is part of our Engineering organisation, but there are certainly connections to the work we’re doing over in Research: they... Read more →

Dynamo Core 2.11 (and Dynamo 2.10 and Generative Design in Revit 2022)

It’s that time of year, where our engineering teams release the primary annual updates to our products. AutoCAD 2022 was released a couple of weeks ago, and Revit 2022 dropped yesterday. I unfortunately spend very little time in our products, these days, so I’ll leave others to extoll their various benefits. Aside from working with the Forge platform, the product (or perhaps feature-set) I spend the most time with is Dynamo. I’m always happy to see Sol’s public release announcements on the DynamoBIM blog, both for his unique writing style and the velocity of improvements the team is making... Read more →

Floppy Friday #23

Yes, every Floppy Friday’s a good Friday, but today’s really a Good Friday. I hope those of you who wish to – and are able to – are enjoying a nice, long weekend. In this week’s episode, we look at three games from 1983-4 that were released on a 1985 compilation called 10 Mega Hits (all I saw on the floppy was “Mega Disk 2”, which makes sense, as the ten games would probably have been delivered on two cassettes or floppies). The games are Super Pipeline, Trollie Wallie and Automania (once again this last one was only on... Read more →

Project Dasher for the Commodore 64

I’ve been having soooo much fun with my Floppy Fridays that I couldn’t resist trying my hand at developing some code for the Commodore 64. It meant dusting off my BASIC skills – and even dipping into some Assembler for some of the more advanced effects – but I think the results are worth it. After some months of behind-the-scenes effort, I can proudly unveil my (and Autodesk Research’s) first project for the C64. Although I found out last week that John Walker – Autodesk’s founder and former CEO – also developed a number of programs for the C64... Read more →

Forge Viewer Data Visualization Extension now in public Beta

Last week Autodesk’s Developer Advocacy and Support team organised their second Forge Accelerator where developers could prototype Digital Twins using the Forge viewer’s Data Visualization Extension (codenamed Hyperion). The first of these Accelerators was back in December: while these virtual Accelerator events are currently held monthly, the Hyperion team needed some time to integrate the feedback from that event, so this was really only the second opportunity to focus on this new capability. I was a little busy last week (mainly with attending and speaking at the AI in AEC 2021 conference, which I found very interesting), so I... Read more →

Floppy Friday #22

I was researching a blog post for next week when I came across a nice surprise. John Walker – the founder and former CEO of Autodesk, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing for this blog more than a decade ago – published some programs he wrote for the Commodore 64 and 128 when he was exploring the capabilities of this platform back in the late 1980s. John had published two of them, Key Clicker and Rainy Day Moon – in Compute! and Commodore Magazine respectively – but the third, BrainSim, was just too far ahead of its time.... Read more →

Autodesk University 2021 Call for Proposals opens on March 30th

I’ve just heard that the Call for Proposals for Autodesk University 2021 goes out next week on March 30th. The CFP period is short – it runs until April 30th – so it’s already time to don your thinking caps and consider what topic or topics you’d like to talk about at this year’s AU. Community voting will be possible as soon as the CFP starts, and will run until May 12th. I’m probably going to submit something related to Dasher and /or Project Hyperion, but I need to plan out what that would look like over the coming... Read more →

Floppy Friday #21

In today’s episode of Floppy Friday I’m happy to say that we’re back on floppies after a couple of weeks focused on cartridge games and unboxing. We play three games, this week: Predator (a trainer for it, anyway), Barry McGuigan World Championship Boxing and Ghosts ‘n Goblins. These games were really chosen at random – and not played beforehand – so I missed a few important details, such as the fact that the protagonist in Ghosts ‘n Goblins was a knight rather than a mummy. Sigh. Here are their reviews from Zzap!64 magazine… Predator Barry McGuigan World Championship Boxing... Read more →

Introducing the LMV Developer Tools (and LMV Ninja)

A few weeks ago I came across an internal link to a new Chrome extension that greatly simplifies the act of working with the Forge viewer (which we refer to inside Autodesk as LMV, or the Large Model Viewer). Earlier this week its developer, Amit Diamant (who some of you may remember from the Big Room Hackathon project) reached out to let me know it was being made public. This was really good news, as these Developer Tools contain some features I know will benefit the community (as I’m already using them myself). The first killer feature is the... Read more →

AI in AEC 2021

Next week the Finnish Association of Civil Engineers (RIL) is holding a virtual conference on the use of Artificial Intelligence in Architecture, Engineering and Construction called AI in AEC 2021. The agenda looks really compelling. These are the presentation tracks, to give you a sense for the topics covered: Data Driven Design Generative Design Impactful AI Project Management Natural Language Processing Smart Buildings Circular Economy Data Analytics Quality Control & Verification Autonomous Construction There are three keynote presentations: two at the opening of the conference at 10am CET on March 24th, while the third (which I’ve been asked to... Read more →

Floppy Friday #20

Ready Player One! This week’s Floppy Friday once again doesn’t show a single floppy disk (sorry!), but focuses on the epic console showcased at the end of Ernest Cline’s retro-lovers’ Bible (not sorry ;-). In this episode we start by unboxing an Atari 2600 console (a “Jr.” version from 1986) bought via an online auction. At the beginning of the episode I had no expectation that we’d be able to tune my basement TV to view the signals output by the console, but by the end we’d played games from all four cartridges that came with the auction lot.... Read more →

International Women’s Day

Like many of you, I have the immense privilege of having incredible women in my life. For me, today is about recognising this privilege, but also remembering that despite more than a century having passed since the original suffragettes started their organised fight against sex-based discrimination, there’s still important work to be done. (In fact I genuinely feel that in recent years we’ve seen a regression in some women’s rights, something that I desperately want to see corrected over the coming years.) It’s important for me to see our daughters (and yes, especially my own beloved daughter, of course)... Read more →

Floppy Friday #19

We’ve reached the end of a much-needed week off up in the mountains. I’ve actually spent a bunch of time fooling around with getting RetroPie working on a Raspberry Pi 400 I bought for the kids (ahem). We’ve been having lots of fun playing Zelda on the NES and Super-NES, Sonic on the Megadrive, and Runn ‘n’ Gunn on the C64. Before leaving to come up, I did record an additional episode of Floppy Friday, although in fairness no floppy was harmed (or used) in the making of this particular episode: we take a look at three C64 games... Read more →

DevDays Online and another "Build Your Own Dasher" Forge Accelerator

I’m currently up in the mountains with my family, enjoying the annual school closure for the kids’ “ski week”. I recognise we’re especially lucky, this year, given that a) Swiss ski resorts are open and b) our kids are at school physically rather than remotely. Spring seems to be hitting early, this year, but even if the snow’s a little soft, the sun is very welcome. Here’s a shot where we’re sitting at the top of a run as a rescue helicopter takes off (this is never good to see, but it is often impressive): Yesterday we went to... Read more →

Floppy Friday #18

This is a big week for 1980s computing. Wednesday marked the 40th birthday of the BBC Microcomputer, the machine that helped launch thousands of software development careers (including mine) in the UK. This was such an important machine, in so many ways: it was really well engineered, with great performance, but also – due to government subsidies – available in the majority of schools in the UK. For my Computer Science A-level I used some networked Beebs to automate a hypothetical fast food restaurant: from touchpad-driven ordering by customers to printing of receipts and stock control. Here’s an image... Read more →

Enhancing exploration of sensor data inside Dasher

I added a “simple” feature to Project Dasher (although it’s not live just yet) the other day, that I think is worth sharing some information about – especially as from a UX perspective it’s completely hidden and amounts to an Easter egg. For a particular project I’ve been searching through sensor data for time periods that tell an interesting story. In Dasher the simplest way to explore the data for one or more sensors (as you can add multiple sensors to a single chart by holding down the Shift key when you click on a sensor) is to use... Read more →

Floppy Friday #17

In this week’s Floppy Friday – a short one, weighing in at under 10 minutes – we look at a couple of games: Bionic Commando and Zaga (sorry – the best article I could find on this game is in Italian). I found a couple of old reviews online for today’s games. The first – for Bionic Commando – is from Zzap! 64 magazine: The second – for Zaga – is from Anirog: As mentioned in today’s episode – and a post from earlier in the week – I have another bundle of retro computing joy about to be... Read more →