Through the Interface

Enhanced Kinect integration for 3D polyline creation

I’ve improved the basic implementation in this previous post pretty significantly over the last week: New ability to draw multiple polylines Added a gesture of lowering/raising the left hand to start/finish drawing with the right Addition of a transient sphere as a 3D cursor for polyline drawing Quick flash of a transient skeleton (arms and chest only) on user detection The jig now perpetuates by changing the screen cursor minutely to and fro Mouse input is needed to keep the jig active; Kinect input doesn’t yet count :-) A new gesture of placing hands together to end drawing At... Read more →

P/Invoke tools

The topic of P/Invoke came up this morning in a discussion with Stephen Preston and Viru Aithal. Stephen mentioned a couple of interesting P/Invoke-related tools he’d stumbled upon, and Viru pointed me at an interesting technique he’d used for P/Invoking unmanaged member functions. In this post I’ll present the tools, in a later post I’ll show Viru’s code. The first tool is the PInvoke Visual Studio Add-in from Red Gate Software (the UK-based provider of various development tools, including Reflector Pro). It appears to be a Visual Studio Add-in for VS2003 and 2005 (I can’t see an update for... Read more →

A couple of blog enhancements

I’ve made added a few new features to this blog over the last few weeks, to help people find related content and to get content in their preferred language. At the bottom of each post – both on the individual posts and the index pages – you’ll find a set of thumbnails delivered by LinkWithin which link – hopefully, at least – to related posts on this blog. Going by the number of people using them to access additional content on the blog, it seems to be of benefit to some readers, at least. I’ve also just integrated a... Read more →

Using Kinect to draw 3D AutoCAD polylines

As promised in this previous post, I’ve been playing around with understanding Kinect gestures inside AutoCAD. My first step – after upgrading the OpenNI modules and drivers to more recent versions, which always seems time-consuming, for some reason – was to work out how to get gesture information via nKinect. It turned out to be very straightforward – as it’s based on OpenNI and NITE, the user-tracking and gesture detection come pretty much for free. A few things I had to work out: We needed a “skeleton callback”, which is called when body movements are detected Because this is... Read more →

Call for AU 2011 proposals

I’m a bit late announcing this, but as I’m due to submit my own proposals for Autodesk University 2011 by the May 6th deadline, I thought I’d post a quick note to remind readers of the fast-closing window of opportunity to submit your own proposals to speak at this year’s AU. I’m definitely submitting a session showing how to integrate AutoCAD with Kinect (please don’t go stealing my idea, now ;-), and I’m chewing on another topic, which may prove to be “choosing the right programming language for working with AutoCAD”. I’m still open to delivering additional sessions, in... Read more →

An unexpected weekend

After spending more hours than I’d wanted, last week, digging into working with the Kinect (as well as keeping up with my normal, day-to-day activities), it was nice to disconnect totally over the weekend. On Saturday I spent most of the day relaxing in the garden, getting it ready for summer, but on Sunday we decided to hitch up the trailer to one of our bikes and head across to a beautiful little (and thankfully nearby) town named Erlach. After having lunch at a restaurant we headed down to the lake for the kids to play. I was surprised... Read more →

Previewing and capturing Kinect sensor data directly inside AutoCAD

Now things are getting interesting. :-) It took me some effort to get this working, but looking at the results I think it was worth it. As mentioned in the last post, I’ve been trying to get a live feed from the Kinect sensor to display dynamically inside AutoCAD. This post shows how to do that. A huge thanks to Boris Scheiman for helping me get to this point: he not only extended his nKinect implementation to generate the point cloud data I asked for, he sent a number of emails explaining (and even providing) the various modules needed... Read more →

ADN DevCast Episode 5 – AutoCAD for Mac development

After a longer-than-anticipated break, Stephen and Fenton are back with an all-new ADN DevCast. This one focuses on developing applications to work with AutoCAD for Mac. They’ve managed to keep the timing of the DevCast down to 20 minutes, so we’re trying just posting this online (rather than having a separate download for offline viewing). Do post a comment if that doesn’t work well for you. Read more →

Initial fooling around with Kinect and AutoCAD

After a completely ridiculous wait of close to 4 months, I finally received my Kinect a few weeks ago. Apart from it being the fastest selling consumer electronics device in history, the delay was also due to the fact I was holding out for the very popular Xbox 360 250Gb Slim bundle (and also because the vendor I chose fumbled the order during the final few weeks, which just added insult to injury). I’d done my homework before receiving the Xbox, and realised that the bundled Kinect would not come with the external power supply needed to connect it... Read more →

A new blog on AutoCAD Civil 3D development

Many readers of this blog are developing code to work with AutoCAD Civil 3D, so I have no doubt that the information in today’s post will be welcomed. Isaac Rodriguez, the Software Engineering Lead for the AutoCAD Civil 3D API, has started Civilized Development, a new blog about developing for AutoCAD Civil 3D. In his welcome post, Isaac describes his motivations for creating the blog and sets expectations for his readers. In case you have suggestions of topics for Isaac to cover, you can post a comment on his blog, email him or contact him via Twitter. A very... Read more →

Jigging an AutoCAD hatch using .NET

This question came in a few weeks ago, which I thought worth addressing: Hi, Kean! I have a question - how can we create hatch during jig? The code in this post endeavours to do just that, but – be warned – isn’t fully successful. The problem I chose to interpret this as is “how do you jig the creation of a polyline, using it as the boundary for an associative hatch?”, and it’s not an easy one to solve. I started by taking Philippe Leefsma’s code from this previous post, which jigs a polyline (including arc segments). I... Read more →

Back from India

I’m back in Switzerland after an incredible week in India. Much of the week was spent in internal meetings – 1-on-1 discussions with members of the DevTech team in Bangalore, as well as a full day of team meetings – but I also had the chance to unwind and enjoy a truly historic event, India’s first Cricket World Cup win in 28 years. I’d only extended my trip by a day as the flight was twice as expensive without the Saturday night stay… and for India to then get so far in the competition and win in such style... Read more →

AutoCAD for DOS 2012

After many years of absence from the platform, AutoCAD is returning to MS-DOS. This is great news for our DOS-based user community, who have been struggling along with R13 for the last decade and a half. Enabled by the application re-architecture performed for AutoCAD for Mac (codenamed “Sledgehammer”), the new AutoCAD for DOS (codenamed “Screwdriver”) will deliver compelling performance with a streamlined user interface experience. AutoCAD for DOS will automatically import any CUI-based customizations, replacing ribbons and other Windows-centric UI elements with equivalent pull-down, screen and icon menus. For those of you wanting to hook up a digitizing tablet... Read more →