Through the Interface

Autodesk Exchange Apps Portathon: code for cash!

Another bit of news from while I was out on vacation – so my apologies if this is old news for you, personally – the ADN team is running a Portathon on September 13-14, 2013 to encourage developers to get their apps posted on Autodesk Exchange. You do not have to be an ADN member to participate and neither do you need to pay in any way (other than with your time and effort). In fact there’s even a financial incentive for participants: for the first 5 apps per developer that get accepted in the Exchange Store – and... Read more →

AutoCAD DGN Hotfix now available

I’m just back from a relaxing week spent in Ried-Brig and Valsesia, two very interesting – and in many ways similar – Alpine locations in Switzerland and Italy respectively. We were travelling with close friends of ours – she’s from Ried-Brig, he’s from Valsesia – which meant the week was packed with interesting (and usually “off the beaten track”) activities. For instance, here’s a panoramic photo I shot from the top of the Sacro Monte in Varallo. Next week I’ll be taking some time off to spend with old friends who are visiting from the UK, but in the... Read more →

Using an Arduino with an arcade joystick to control lasers

As mentioned in the last post, I had some fun ripping apart laser pointer key-rings and repurposing their laser diodes to (at last!) use my Arduino to blink something a bit more interesting than LEDs. This project is really just about blinking lasers using the switches inside a joystick – nothing very complicated. I’m not using servo or stepper motors to create a controllable laser turret or even my own 3D scanner (both of which sound like interesting future projects ;-). A quick note on the source of these lasers. I picked up a bunch of laser pointer key-ring... Read more →

Using an Arduino with an arcade joystick to control LEDs

Over the long July 4th weekend (always a great time for me, being based in Europe, to catch up on projects free from interruption) I dusted off my Arduino and started playing around with it again. My goal was to hook up my Zippyy arcade joystick to find out how it might be used to control electronics circuits, in this post to control LEDs but later to drive some 1mW lasers I salvaged from some broken toy key-rings. The joystick was actually simpler than I expected to hook up, in that it’s essentially a collection of 4 switches: one... Read more →

Integrating Paper.js with Leap Motion using JavaScript

Today marks the public release of the Leap Motion controller: people who pre-ordered devices will start to receive them today, so it seemed a good time to post something related to it. Last week I came across a really interesting JavaScript library called Paper.js. According to its website, it’s “an open source vector graphics scripting framework that runs on top of the HTML5 Canvas. It offers a clean Scene Graph / Document Object Model and a lot of powerful functionality to create and work with vector graphics and bezier curves, all neatly wrapped up in a well designed, consistent... Read more →

A new version of DesignScript on Autodesk Labs

In case you missed it, last week Scott Sheppard announced the availability of a new version of DesignScript on Autodesk Labs. This release unveils DesignScript Studio which brings a visual programming environment to the DesignScript language. People who are familiar with Rhino Grasshopper or SoftImage’s ICE will be aware of the benefits of working with a graphical tool for mapping associations and flows of data. I personally prefer working directly in code, myself, but there are certainly times when this kind of tool can help unravel complexity. The other primary feature is a new lightweight OpenGL-based script execution tool... Read more →

More knots in Tinkercad using JavaScript

After working out how generally to use Brandon Cole’s Shape Script code to display mathematical shapes in Tinkercad, I carried on looking for some interesting functions to “plot”. I ended up finding definitions for two Cinquefoil knots, specifically the (2,5) and the (5,2) variations (I also tried the (5,1), but that ended up looking just like the (5,2)). This “page that once was” helped a great deal with the underlying formulae, as of course did the online derivative calculator (Brandon tells me he personally used Wolfram Alpha to calculate his derivatives, a site I’ve blogged about in the past).... Read more →

Minor update to the DGN Purge command

For those who have (quite understandably) not been following the story unfolding around this tool, here’s a quick timeline so far. I’ve largely pieced this together from emails, as I don’t typically tag blog updates with a date (something it seems I ought to consider starting). 12/12/12 – In response to a request from our Product Support team, the original implementation was posted to this blog. 03/28/13 – I posted an update to the original post with a minor fix to handle corrupted drawings a bit better (Update). 06/21/13 – A tool based on the (updated) code was published... Read more →

A quick trip back to the Fab Lab

I stopped by the Fab Lab in Neuchâtel, last week, to say a quick hello and find out what’s being worked on. Gaetan Bussy, the Lab manager, spent some time talking to me about some projects they have in the pipeline, one of which is to hack their Ultimaker to make it work with polar rather than (and eventually in addition to) Cartesian coordinates. Gaetan also showed me the latest addition to the Lab’s equipment, a B9Creator they received after backing its Kickstarter project. The project was successfully funded (and then some) a year ago, so I was quite... Read more →

Drawing a figure of eight knot inside Tinkercad using JavaScript

Following on from my initial playing around with Tinkercad and its Shape Script implementation, I started to look more closely into what’s possible with the Gen6 kernel. I came across this recent blog post, which highlights the ability to make Shape Script implementation details public. The Shape Scripts shown in the post looked nice and complex, so I tracked down the model by selecting “Discover” inside Tinkercad and searching for “Brandon Cole”, the originator of these very interesting Shape Scripts. He published this design about 3 weeks ago, which I went ahead and copied (yes, shamelessly, but at least... Read more →

1K

This is the 1,000th post to “Through the Interface” – a milestone I mentioned was coming up a few weeks ago. Which means I’m hitting about 142 posts per year, which is pretty much on target (I aim for 3 posts a week, so that’s about right). Something that occurred to me, over the weekend, is that it’s often not very easy to discover content contained in the blog: there’s search (which usually seems to work well, but even I have trouble finding posts I’m sure I’ve written, from time to time) and the post indices (“Post Index” and... Read more →

Moonlighting

I had a fun Saturday morning, a couple of weeks ago. An old school-friend of my wife’s is a partner in a temporary art tattoo business (which hopefully means a business that sells temporary art tattoos rather than a temporary business that sells art tattoos ;-), and they were looking for bald models to help showcase their wares. So I went along for my first – and quite possibly last – modelling assignment. The fact that they were only interested in the top of my head made the gig a lot easier. Here’s the resulting image: What’s interesting is... Read more →

Creating a grid of columns inside Tinkercad using JavaScript

A little over a month ago, Autodesk acquired Tinkercad. Tinkercad is a 3D CAD tool that uses WebGL to display graphics directly in your browser. While this tool is primarily targeted at consumers – it’s proving very popular among the 3D printing community – I thought I’d check it out to understand its customization capabilities. If you want to get to know the capabilities of the Tinkercad system, I suggest taking a look at these step-by-step lessons. I personally just dove right in – the system is very straightforward to learn – but I’m sure there are basics that... Read more →

Finding an AutoCAD spline between two others using .NET

I received this question in a blog comment: How to determine the NurbCurve3d center between two NurbCurve3ds? I chose to interpret this in the following way: given two NurbCurve3d objects, create a NurbCurve3d that sits exactly between the two. NurbCurve3d are “AcGe” classes – which means they’re non-graphical – so I’ve broadened the scope to deal with Splines as they have a close relationship with the NurbCurve3d class (in fact there are handy methods to convert between the two classes). Here’s some more information on NURBS, for those with an interest. I’ve also chosen to deal with one fairly... Read more →