Through the Interface

What I got for Christmas

One of the ulterior motives (although you might really consider it a mere side benefit) for my recent trip back to the UK was to pick up the Christmas presents I’d bought for myself on behalf of my wife and kids. :-) The first – one of the new Raspberry Pi Model B’s with 512 MB of memory – could have been ordered from Switzerland, but I was a bit frustrated at the mark-up added by the local reseller (the previous one I bought from the UK and had shipped directly here from China… that no longer seems possible... Read more →

Project Falcon for AutoCAD

I’ve been waiting for this one to be published, as I’ve been working very closely with the team that has been developing this particular integration: Project Falcon for AutoCAD is now available on Autodesk Labs. The integration is really impressive: they’ve managed to really push the limits of the AutoCAD transient graphics API with some pretty incredible results. They’ve used a number of techniques that have also been shared on this blog to get the application working. It’s hard to do it justice with pictures – download it for 64-bit AutoCAD and take it for a spin! Now if... Read more →

Hooking into AutoCAD copy & paste via Ctrl-C and -V

This was a fun question that came in from James Meading. I genuinely didn’t think I’d manage to look into it before the break, but it tweaked my interest during my trip back from the UK: I thought this might be a topic you would be interested in. I do not use ctrl-v for pasting entities, only text to command line. I already tried removing the keyboard shortcuts to ctrl-v via the cui, and that just makes ctrl-v not do anything when command line does not have focus. So I think I need to write a transparent function, make... Read more →

Zooming, panning and orbiting the current AutoCAD view using .NET

I’ve taken a few days off to visit some very old friends who are back in the UK from New Zealand for the festive season, but thought I’d go ahead and share some code I’ve been playing with, even if I can’t actually tell you what it’s for. I can tell you what it does, of course, but I’m using it in conjunction with some other capabilities that I’m probably not allowed to talk about explicitly. Feel free to speculate at your leisure, I may or may not be able to confirm or deny your suspicions (I need to... Read more →

Midlife crisis planning

As I inexorably head towards the end of my 30s (just a few months to go, now), I feel more and more justified to get cracking on a proper midlife crisis. And I’ve been told that to get the most out of a good crisis, you really need to invest in at least a little crisis planning. :-) My most recent bout of rumination kicked off at AU2012, when – to my huge surprise – I stumbled across a new Morgan 3 Wheeler. Here’s a picture of the car with Jon Wells, the Senior Designer at Morgan Motor Company... Read more →

Loading games on my ZX Spectrum from an iPod Photo

As mentioned in this previous post, I’ve been having fun with an old 16K ZX Spectrum that a colleague kindly gave me a few months ago. After getting it working with a modern TV set, the next challenge was to get some games loaded into it. Pretty much any game you’ve ever played or heard of for the Spectrum is available online in digital format, although it should be stated that most are still protected by copyright. World of Spectrum has a great collection, and if you go further afield you can find “complete” archives that people have posted.... Read more →

Purging unwanted DGN linestyle data from an AutoCAD drawing using .NET

I had an interesting question from a member of our Product Support team, last week. They’ve been working with a number of customers regarding large files resulting from importing DGN data into AutoCAD: it turns out that the internal structure for complex DGN linestyles created by the DGNIMPORT command – while working very well when the data is “live” – makes the data difficult to remove once no longer needed. [Quickly, a big “thank you” to a couple of old friends and colleagues. Firstly to Markus Kraus, who helped explain the data structure created by DGNIMPORT, and then to... Read more →

Creating a square AutoCAD box via the jig entity framework and .NET

After creating a frustum-shaped jig “manually”, refactoring the code while introducing the idea of an “Entity Jig Framework and then updating the framework and providing a number of usage examples, today’s post looks at a slightly more complex use-case: defining a jig to create a square (in X & Y) box by selecting opposing corners. It may sound simple, but it was actually harder that it sounds – especially when supporting the use of an arbitrary User Coordinate System. It also makes use of a “phase” type that we previously hadn’t needed, as we require point input for our... Read more →

Update to the AutoCAD .NET entity jig framework

In the last post I introduced a simple framework to make the definition of multi-input entity jigs more straightforward. A big thanks to Chuck Wilbur, who provided some feedback that has resulted in a nicer base implementation, which we’ll take for a spin in today’s post. Here’s the updated C# framework code that makes use of a simple class hierarchy for our phase definitions: using Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Geometry; using System.Collections.Generic; using System; namespace JigFrameworks { // Two abstract base classes: one for all phases... public abstract class Phase { // Our member data (could add real properties,... Read more →

A framework for defining AutoCAD entity jigs using .NET

In the last post we saw some code to create a frustum-shaped Solid3d object inside AutoCAD. I mentioned at the bottom of that post that there seemed to be an opportunity to write a framework of some kind to abstract away some of the repetitive code needed to create a multi-input jig. I probably didn’t say it in quite that way, but that was what I was getting at. :-) Anyway, after having looked at it some more, here’s what I came up with: the EntityJigFramework. It’s a class derived from EntityJig that encapsulates some of the common code... Read more →

Jigging a frustum-shaped AutoCAD solid using .NET

As promised, here’s the cleaned-up code to jig a frustum inside AutoCAD. When I took on the task of writing this code – live, during the “AutoCAD Programming Gurus Go Head to Head” class at AU – I thought to myself “that should be easy enough – I’m sure I have some code to jig a solid on my blog”. Well, I did, but it turned out the code showed how to jig a box, and the code was in Python and Ruby but not C#. So I ended up having to code for my supper, after all. ;-)... Read more →

Heading home

I’m sitting at SFO, waiting for my flight to Heathrow to board and depart (hopefully on time, considering the series of storms that have hit San Francisco over the last few days). I was going to write something technical to post, but in the end I changed my mind: I’m going to sit back, watch some TV and have a drink. Thanks for all the support and kind words I received at this year’s AU: as ever it was an incredibly interesting and rewarding experience (just speaking from a personal perspective), but it was especially important to me, this... Read more →