Through the Interface

Happy Halloween!

For fun, here’s a quick preview of this year’s Halloween costume (our what-now-seems-to-be-annual Halloween Party is on this coming Saturday, but as it’s the 31st I thought I’d put it on to scare any kids coming to the door). I hope those of you on the path of Hurricane Sandy have made it all safely through the “Frankenstorm” and that life returns to normal for you very soon. Read more →

APPHACK @ AU 2012

Some interesting news has come through from my friend Micah Dickerson, a Product Manager on the AutoCAD team. He organised the Autodesk-internal APPHACK event I travelled across to the Bay Area for, earlier in the year, and he’s just launched another one that’s open to Autodesk Developer Network members and runs until November 14th, with the main prize-giving held at AU 2012 in Las Vegas. There are some nice prizes up for grabs: Grand prize: US$5,000 2nd prize: US$2,000 3rd prize: US$1,000 4th prizes: 10 finalists will receive a recently-released tablet computer worth ~$500 * [* This being the... Read more →

My new ZX Spectrum

I had a fantastic surprise at the beginning of the week: a friend from work – to whom I’d shown my retro-foolings with the Raspberry Pi – brought a plastic bag to my desk containing an original Sinclair ZX Spectrum and power supply. He had talked about my project to a friend of his back home in Rome, who thought I’d like it (he was otherwise going to throw it away). The computer was in very good condition externally, at least: I was impressed by the condition of the keyboard, in particular, as these very quickly became dirty and... Read more →

Updated version of WinRT Apollonian Viewer for Windows 8 RTM

As part of my preparation for AU 2012, I’ve been working on updating the various Windows 8 samples I’ll be showing to work with the RTM version of the OS. The first to be migrated was the Apollonian Viewer for WinRT, which is part of the cloud & mobile series from earlier in the year. The project was easy enough to get working: I mostly had to update to version 2.3.0 (or 2.3.1, as this was the latest available) of SharpDX and made a few minor code changes (there was previously a SafeDispose() function that seems to have disappeared... Read more →

YASL?

Since mentioning my earlier involvement with DesignScript, I’ve been meaning to follow up with a qu... Read more →

Why are Point2d and Point3d objects immutable?

It’s been a hectic week and I haven’t been able to find much time to work on a final post for today, so I had a quick delve in my “interesting” folder and found this little gem. Not long ago, someone asked me by email about the reason for making the various co-ordinate properties (X/Y/Z) of Autodesk.AutoCAD.Geometry.Point2d and Point3d read-only, essentially making these classes immutable. Being a big fan of functional programming, I can think of lots of good reasons for immutability, most of which (and more) have also been given to justify the logic behind making System.String an... Read more →

Debugging an OpenGL ES 2.0 application using a virtual Android device

With my AUv recording out of the way, I’ve been starting to think more seriously about my AU sessions, over the last few days. The “big one” (with 100+ registered attendees and counting) is about moving code from a desktop application to the cloud, and will basically summarise the process I followed in my “cloud & mobile” series of earlier in the year. Which means I’ll go through the process of pulling some code out of a desktop-based application and placing it behind a web-service, before calling the service from a variety of platforms/environments (AutoCAD via .NET, iOS, Android,... Read more →

Virtually done

Over the weekend, from Friday to Sunday, I spent far more hours than I’d have liked finishing off my AU Virtual class for this year, “Secure Your AutoCAD Environment” (I’m increasingly involved in security-related activities for the AutoCAD development organisation). Preparing material for AU Virtual is often pretty tough, whether it’s being recorded in person (I’ve done a couple of those) or being in advance and needing extensively editing. This year’s format was a bit different, in that it required multiple modules to be recorded separately as opposed to a single, monolithic recording. Better from a consumption perspective, apparently,... Read more →

DesignScript now available for download from Autodesk Labs

I’m really excited about this. A new programming language and environment for AutoCAD is now available for download on Autodesk Labs (and here’s the announcement on Scott’s blog, in case, and you should also be aware of this login/download issue – something I just ran into myself). Way back when, I helped integrate the initial incarnation of DesignScript – although at the time we were using its working name, D# – inside AutoCAD. The father of the language, Robert Aish, was put in touch with me on October 17th 2008 and by the time I headed for Las Vegas... Read more →

Creating a face-recognising security cam with a Raspberry Pi – Part 4

This is the final part of the series on creating a face-recognising security cam. We started by showing how to get motion detection working, and then followed with an initial overview and then posts on the separate Facebook-downloader tool and the onboard face detection component. In this post, we’ll see how we managed to connect up a USB-powered LED message-board from DreamCheeky. I was originally inspired to use this device to present the results of the Facecam while having dinner at a friend’s place. He’s a fellow geek – even his welcome mat says so – so we Googled... Read more →

Animating transient AutoCAD graphics using .NET

A developer had an interesting requirement that I thought I’d spend some time looking at: to animate transient graphics inside AutoCAD according to data they’ve pulled in from an external simulation system. It’s clear that AutoCAD is really not an animation platform – we have other products that are better suited to working in this way – but I thought it would be interesting to see what was possible. I decided to take the implementation shown in this previous post and throw in some code to animate a few different things: Change the per-vertex colours of our transient box... Read more →

Querying for XCLIP information inside AutoCAD using .NET

This question came in recently by email: I have reached a snag when trying to find the boundaries of external references that have been "xclipped" by the user. Or, to be more precise, I can't even really find the data telling me whether or not the external reference has been "xclipped" at all. I'm wondering if you have any idea how or where I could find this data. While I found this previous post showing how to perform an XCLIP, I couldn’t find anything showing how to query for XCLIP information. Here’s some C# code that does just that... Read more →

Retro computing with the Raspberry Pi

I’ve decided to interrupt my series on creating a face-recognising security cam to cover another Raspberry Pi-related topic, this week. I’ll try to finish my series write-up for next Wednesday. At the recommendation of an old friend from University, I recently devoured the excellent “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline. Ernest was apparently born about a year before me, so to say that the copious pop-culture references from the 1980s resonated would be a massive under-statement. I just wish I’d come across it sooner (in time to have a shot at solving the Easter Egg and winning a 1981... Read more →

Adding per-vertex colours to a transient AutoCAD shell using .NET

In the last post, we introduced some code to generate transient graphics using WorldGeometry.Shell(). In this post we’ll make one simple addition: we’ll add per-vertex colours, to see the effect on the generated box. We’re not going to perform complex calculations to determine the appropriate colours for each vertex: we’ll just use the index of the vertex itself, in much the same way as we did for the faces. As faces and vertices in no way match, index-wise, we should see some interesting effects. Here’s the modified C# code. There is only one addition to the previous code: a... Read more →